OLD FAITH IN A MODERN CITY
Anna Ziegler’s play was an off-Broadway sellout, glimmering with insights into Jewish-American family conflicts, traditions and rebellions. It’s a natural for Marylebone Theatre after its brilliant presentation of WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, so hopes ran high, and Ziegler’s intelligent, sensitive remarks about its creation are interesting. The massive snag is that in a fine cast of five the most central protagonist is woefully hard to like.
This is Abe, a young literary star who aspires to be Philip Roth, certainly mentions him enough. He is married to Sophie (Paksie Vernon), a likeable mixed-race Black/Jewish woman: who refreshingly insists that “slavery and the Holocaust don’t define me, I grew up in Albany” . Her only novel didn’t meet success, so she is shunted into the background of motherhood and supporing Abe’s ambition in the excruciatingly precious self-regarding world of NY literati (everyone in this play is annoyingly anxious to be “seen”. Reminded me of a very good gag in a Jon Cantor play – “finding yourself? Just as well, nobody else is looking for you”.)
Their life difficulties are theatrically scrawled in chapters – Marriage, Parenthood, Boredom – on the set’s advanced glass walls and are pretty hackneyed, but the interest lies in the fact that Abe is a defector from a strict Hasidic community. Often onstage in their own marriage are his bygone parents, Schmuli and Esther. We see them first being shy, awkward together as arranged newlyweds: she asks him what he saw when he first glimpsed his bride and it was only her shoes. Esther’s long wedding veil is a prop and symbol all through, creatively used under Igor Golyak’s direction, wrapping or disguising or comforting all the charaters. Glimpses of the careful, devout traditional family life shimmer in the background of Abe and Sophie’s 21c laicism: Katerina Tannenbaum, a very welcome newcomer to the professional stage, is a beautiful, luminous presence as Esther. This is a woman whose intelligence battles with obedience, who would like to step out into the world more, own a computer. She has read books about sex and birth and what to expect. Schmuli knows nothing about all that, but looms helpfully over her after each daughter has been is born, citing seventy prayers for the seventy stages of labour in the Torah. And, of course, praying for a son to come at last.
That son, of course, is Abe, who is in the foreground leading a life centuries beyond theirs, and saying artist-privilege things like “it’s a valid choice to be selfish” . He is, in his writerly vanity and husbandly boredom, engaged in a long, flirtatious email correspondence with a famous actress, Julia who once liked his reading at an event (we get a taste of it, plonking stuff which quivers with unwanted symbolism). This obsession grows: Anna Poppelwell’s gorgeous Julia flits around, her virtual presence felt as real by Abe, she every bit as wrapped up in him as he requires a woman to be and few real wives actually are.
It is only in the far more engaging second half that we find out why Abe hardly knew his father, though old Schmuli haunts his dreams; we see dimly behind the glass one of those terrible fundamentalist moments as Esther, bravely and “ sinfully” declares that she does not want yet more childbirths after Abe. Whereon the leader of the community has her banned from seeing her young daughters lest she corrupt them with that dreadful awareness that contraception exists.
Here the drama catches fire at last, and then rises to a really sharp revelation with the aggravated wife Sophie, which I shall not spoil. There are more moments with the infinitely more likeable, if religiously imprisoned, parents . Schmuli explains that he might be able to “forgive” Esther, who has run away to the wide NY world with their son . She, as incredulous of this attitude as we are, nonetheless expresses a beautiful nostalgia for their earlier lives in the community. It’s as moving in its tribute to Jewish community warmth as the dance at the end of the Anne Frank play. “The Fridays, the Fridays, the birthdays and the holidays . And the way that nobody is forgotten..a song that will never end”.
Abe, of course, is alone on stage for the last moments, as every self-absorbed NY litterateur would wish to be. But alas, I still couldn’t like him. It’s Schmuli and Esther who won the fourth mouse, just.
www.marylebonetheatre.com. To 29 Nov
Rating. 4
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