Arena Stage – From Under the Fig Tree

Like so many Americans, I was not quite sure how to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings was one option; attending to the Times’ commemorative edition was another and watching television coverage of the day’s events was a third. But none of these quite satisfied.

Little wonder, then, that when the chance to see the Arena Stage’s production of Oklahoma! presented itself, I jumped at the opportunity.

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone. The theater was packed with a heterogeneous mix of Washingtonians: grandparents with their knowing preteen grandchildren in tow; eager, thirty-something, parents with young children; veteran theater-goers.

The production had the same galvanizing effect on its audience that I suspect it did way back when, in 1943, it first debuted on Broadway, at the height of World War II. We clapped, cheered, bounced up and down in our seats and sang enthusiastically, if off-key, along with the cast.

Then, as now, at a time when things looked awfully bleak, the wit, energy and sheer hopefulness of Oklahoma! offered a reassuring counter-narrative. Then, as now, disparate bands of Americans sought the consolations and supports of community through music, dance and theater.

As an added bonus, I emerged from my encounter with the play even more resolute in my commitment to establishing a MA in Jewish Cultural Arts at GW. Taking my cue from one of the production’s signature songs, “I cain’t say no” to the manifold possibilities this program presents.

GW’s MA in Jewish Cultural Arts -- the very first of its kind in the entire nation -- will make its debut in the fall of next year. Heralding the centrality of culture -- of the visual as well as the performing arts -- to the Jewish experience, it not only enlarges the repertoire of sources on which the academic field of Judaic Studies rests but also creates an infrastructure -- an intellectual community -- given over generously and unstintingly to a critical engagement with the arts.

Just as Oklahoma! set in motion a new direction for the American theater, this MA program, I hope, will offer a new and equally compelling pathway to the study, preservation and promotion of Jewish culture.

Won’t you join me in spreading the word?

There aren’t too many novels that can lay claim to a second, much less a third, lease on life as both a film and a play, especially when the subject at hand has to do with religion and faith. But The Chosen, Chaim Potok’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life in Brooklyn during the waning years of the 1940s, has, of late, scored a home run.

These days, it takes the form of a critically acclaimed play which, thanks to a creative partnership between Theater J and Arena Stage, can be seen at the latter’s 800-seat Fichandler Theatre downtown.

Nearly 30 years earlier, The Chosen, its palette awash in brown and ochre, was brought to the silver screen, where the likes of Maximillian Schell and Rod Steiger inhabited the roles of a modern Orthodox Jew and a Hasidic rebbe, respectively. The film’s opening scene -- a baseball game between yeshiva boys and their Hasidic counterparts -- remains as powerful today as it first did a generation ago.

And before that, the novel made its debut in 1967. Initial reviews were lukewarm and tepid.

Eliot Fremont-Smith, writing in The New York Times, called the book “thematically overstuffed and dramatically undernourished,” adding, snippily, that its dramatic arc had been reached by page 37. (He subsequently changed his mind about the book, admitting that his initial judgment had been too hasty.)

But the reading public took to The Chosen with great and immediate relish and within a few months’ time, this revelatory coming of age story had become a runaway best-seller, first in cloth and then in paperback. The novel, related its publisher with unbridled glee, “is one of the happiest phenomena in recent publishing history,” noting that it “rings just as true in Iowa as in Brooklyn.”

An exercise in de-mystification, a study in friendship, a tale of fathers and sons – all these are possible explanations for the book’s hold on the American imagination. Whatever the reason, The Chosen is well worth another look.

But hurry: the play, followed by a talk-back between yours truly and Ari Roth, the artistic director of Theater J, is scheduled to close next Sunday.

Tag: Arena Stage

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