The Chosen: A Chaim Potok Classic at Boston’s Lyric Stage

Joel Colodner, Zachary Eisenstadt, Luke Murtha

 

The Chosen, the Lyric Stage’s latest production, is based on Chaim Potok’s well-known novel. Written in 1967, and adapted for the stage by Potok in collaboration with Aaron Posner in 1999, the play is an exercise in nostalgia. It takes us back to an insular Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 1940s. The play is naturalistic with overtones of symbolist theatre, its style somewhat reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It too has a narrator who, like Our Town’s Stage Manager, plays several roles, the most significant the adult Reuven (Charles Linshaw). However, this character is more a device to fill in the exposition than Wilder’s omniscient Stage Manager. Rather than enriching the drama, the awkward presence of the narrator points up its lack, while emphasizing the paltry number of characters.

The Chosen’s opening lines announce its theme and plot. “Silence. Pause. Silence. For words to be spoken there must be silence before and after.” Two Jewish boys, one Orthodox, the other Hassidic become friends. Each has an intense relationship with his father, leaders of their respective communities. David Malter (Will McGarrahan), a religious scholar, engages in warm communication with his son, the young Reuven (Zachary Eisenstat) guiding him with his words. The formidable Reb Saunders (Joel Colodner), Danny’s father, denies his son any overt sign of love, sympathy, advice or conversation. Their only communication takes place during their passionate study of the Talmud when the rigorous rabbi tests his brilliant son’s eidetic memory.

While his father’s treatment has made Danny (Luke Murtha) yearn for connection, the boy remains self-contained. Reuven and Danny’s friendship grows out of enmity. They meet as rivals in a baseball game between Yeshiva teams founded to prove that Jews can be as American as Gentiles, the only reference to the non-Jewish world in Act I. This aspiration is seemingly belied by Danny’s Hassidic appearance, complete with payess (side curls), black vest, talus (prayer shawl), and tzitzik (knotted fringes) hanging below his shirt. Danny, a skillful and determined player, hits the ball straight into Reuven’s eye, an act, Danny later says, committed out of hatred. Their friendship grows from this unlikely beginning as does the link between the two families with the sons as surrogates for their fathers and the converse, although the two fathers never meet.

At times, we see parallel scenes of the two households. In one, Danny serves his father tea, which they drink together in mournful silence at a dimly lit table, downstage right. Simultaneously, Reuven and his father converse over tea in David Malter’s book filled study. His affection for Reuven, notwithstanding, Malter, in his own way, is a controlling figure or so he seems in Will McGarrahan’s performance. Both fathers try to influence the other’s son. Malter introduces Danny to forbidden secular books; Rev Saunders tempts the mathematically inclined Reuven with the mystical cabalistic numerology of his particular brand of Hasidism. And, in fact, both fathers succeed; Danny joins the more secular world as a psychoanalyst and Reuven rejects the logic of mathematics to become an Orthodox rabbi.

Act II exposes the evils and struggles of the 1940s with the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust and the reactions of American Jewry. Reb Saunders and David Malter represent the conflicting positions on the founding of Israel of the Hassidic and Orthodox communities, at least in The Chosen where Malter develops into a spokesperson for Zionism. (Reform and Conservative Judaism are ignored in this work.) For Reb Saunders, Israel can have no real existence unless granted by God. To believe otherwise is heresy. When Malter gives a pro-Israel speech at Madison Square Garden, Saunders prohibits the boys’ relationship, putting an end to the ongoing conversation that sustains them. The play ends with Reb Saunders’s acceptance of Danny’s career, but only after the young Reuven has once again acted as the intermediary between the rabbi and his son.

Much of the The Chosen’s material is interesting, although sometimes delivered in an informational rather than dramatic fashion. It is seen through the eyes of a thirty-eight year old Chaim Potok looking back to an era more than twenty years earlier – his boyhood. The bitterness often associated with memoirs does not exist here. It is, however, prey to sentimentality. The Chosen is an old-fashioned, pat work that follows the schema of the well-made play down to the disclosure of a secret, in this case, the reason for Reb Saunders’s silent treatment, the central question. But the well-made play with its psychological realism and easy to follow plots continues to attract the public. During the performance I attended, the audience appeared engrossed. And while even a limited knowledge of Judaism is helpful to understanding the work, it is not necessary.

The Lyric Stage’s plays take place on a small three quarter round, which, despite its limitations, usually manages to serve the company’s productions well. For The Chosen, there is a platform upstage that holds an arch which has various functions. It becomes the synagogue’s ark in one scene. Images of the Torah are projected onto it. A second platform, upstage left represents the Malter’s home. The compact stage can be disconcerting as when Danny and the young Reuven circle the small space on supposed long walks. The acting was sometimes stiff, particularly in the first act. Ironically, for a play about the importance of communication, the actors do not always relate to each other very well.

The Chosen

By Chaim Potok and Aaron Posner

Lyric Stage, Boston, MA

Director – Daniel Gidron
Sound Designer – Dewey Dellay
Scenic Designer – Brynna Bloomfield*
Costume Designer – Mallory Frers
Lighting Designer – John Malinowski

Cast:

Charles Linshaw as Reuven Malter
Zachary Eisenstat as Young Reuven
Joel Colodner as Reb Saunders
Will McGarrahan as David Malter
Luke Murtha as Danny Saunders