All About Jewish Theatre - The Chosen : study for Jewish knowledge, observance, and tradition

DAVID Y. CHACK is Director of Community Development for the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School, a Project of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the North American Office. His Jewish culture and performing arts credentials are as a playwright, director, critic, teacher, and producer. He was a founding member of the Boston Jewish Arts Coalition; arts editor and president of Genesis2 - a Jewish political and cultural journal; founder and director of the Louisville Jewish Film Festival and Assistant Executive Director of the Louisville Jewish Community Center; and Interim Executive Director of Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Currently through the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School he works with new communities to start Mini-Schools and teaches Jewish texts and inter-textual analysis using interactive techniques - especially the course "Dramas of Jewish Living". He writes theatre and performance criticism and teaches Jewish film, theatre, and popular entertainment. He did his B.F.A. in acting at New York University and Circle-in-the-Square Theater; theatre criticism and dramatic theory at Tufts University under renowned theatre scholar Laurence Senelick; and work towards a Ph.D. at Boston University with writer, playwright, and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel. Website: http://www.historybox.com/throughline/index1.htm Email Address: chack@iglou.com

The Chosen is playing at Writers Theatre, outside Chicago, until July 16 (664 Vernon Avenue Glencoe, Illinois 60022).

The cast of The Chosen includes Nicholas Cimino (Danny Saunders), Sean Fortunato (Reuven Malter), Jürgen Hooper (Young Reuven), Craig Spidle (David Malter) and Jeff Still (Reb Saunders).Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

It was a decent production, very true to the book as I remember it.

Nevertheless it bothered me. Though it was good at showing observant Jews beyond their stereotypes it didn't seem to have a sharp point of view. It was so busy being respectful it didn't have an edge. It had a narrator, Chaim Potok or the older Reuven Malter, the protagonist, and he was very pleasant and the rabbi we all wish we had. He was warm, thoughtful, animated, seemingly easy to get along with. And the set seemed to be in the rabbi's study, so it had a comfortable paneled wood feeling about it.

But gone was the time period it was set in, WWII (though it came up enough), economic difficulties, and the desire to assimilate were faint at best. The play lacked the bite and anguish of the times because it was mostly about Jews just getting along with each other.

In 2003 Maurice Sendak was interviewed on the radio show "Fresh Air" by Terry Gross (recently replayed) and he talked about how that time period was so sad and anguished for his family and other Jewish families he knew. His family had been very involved in a labor union and his parents basically knew what was happening in the death camps. The Holocaust made everything feel filled with guilt, pain, and suffering.

Nevertheless the play was well directed and well acted and the things it got right, it got right very well -- giving a good sense of the importance of study for Jewish knowledge, observance, and tradition; the problems of fathers expecting too much from their children; the friendship of the two boys and how they supported each other like a Jonathan and David -- all done at a high level.

Of course it exhibited a strong Jewish sensibility, not only in its content, but through the staging of the narrator, time and space conflation, and scenes that were both about Talmudic interpretation and written as though they were midrash (sacred commentaries on the text and life). For instance the narrator stepped in and out of the story commenting on the scenes, the story (or one might say, parable) of the baseball game, the scene with mystical numerology (gematria) that leads to deeper spiritual understandings of the sacred texts, the mystical use of silence, and the singing of Chasidic niggunim -- all lent itself to a very strong Jewish aesthetic.

When Chaim Potok wrote the book, The Chosen, in 1967, it was the first American novel that depicted religious Jews positively and showed their drive to succeed in America and their desire to explore different pathways to faith. It was revolutionary and perhaps still revolutionary today because it shows that faith and learning, whether religious learning or secular learning, can live together even if they sometimes make each other uncomfortable. Today in the age of political false messiahs and fundamentalist creationism, The Chosen may still have something to teach us.

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