Theater J – From Under the Fig Tree

During the 10-day period that spans Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, it’s customary to attend to your soul, contemplate your shortcomings, and resolve to do better. Some of the rabbis I know call this “spiritual work.”

Yentl Theater J — Yentl. Source: Theater J

Mine took the form of going to the theater with a number of my graduate students in tow. Appropriately enough, the play we went to see was Theater J’s absorbing new production of Yentl.

This version of the I.B. Singer short story Yentl, der yeshive-bokher, places sexual ambiguity, or “spiritual androgyny,” as the title character puts it right at the getgo, at its core. Earlier versions, especially the 1980s Barbra Streisand vehicle, placed a premium on feminism, on yearnings that had more to do with the intellect than the body.

What struck me as I compared the merits of both productions wasn’t so much the realization that each generation fashions a Yentl that speaks most directly to its singular set of concerns. What struck me most forcefully was the power of the voice or, more to the point, the power of multiple voices, joined together in song and conversation.

From listening to the performers sing and act to engaging in lively discussion about the play with my students the very next morning, I came away heartened, even energized, by the possibilities that lie in store for those fortunate enough to use our voices in song, speech and prayer.

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: Theater J

The voice

Chosen-ness