The stage for The Chosen is small, almost claustrophobic, and yet it contains two worlds, four years and two generations, as well as traditions, expectations, developments, pains and joys thousands of years old.
Presented in two acts, each an hour or so long, the drama is based on the Chaim Potok novel The Chosen (adapted by Aaron Posner), and it is that rarest of theater events these days: a thoughtful, intelligent and literary work. Set in Brooklyn, the play explores the evolving friendship between two boys: Reuven Malter, a forward-thinking, outgoing orthodox Jew, and Danny Saunders, a constricted, intense Hasidic Jew. Because the play is set from 1944 to 1948, the tumultuous backdrop for the boys' fledgling friendship includes World War II, the concentration camps and the founding of Israel.
Mercifully, the play employs the device of a reliable narrator — Reuven Malter as an older man — and it is in his affable and informed company that the audience journeys back in time —not back to a simpler, lovelier time, as is often the case in works that evoke the past through the fog of nostalgia, but rather back to a difficult, challenging period during which the young men are laying the foundations of their lives as surely as the Zionists are laying the foundations of Israel. But the story is not simply about the relationship between Reuven and Danny; it is equally about the relationship between each boy and his own father, about the relationship of each one to his own conscience and religion, and about the relationship between American Jewry and the larger world.
Needless to say then, there is a lot to reveal and resolve in these two acts on this tiny stage, but co-directors Eileen Koteles and Richard Coppinger have shaped a tight and sharp production that, with only a few exceptions, accomplishes that task, while the five-member cast moves nimbly amid the complexities.
Greg Milton leads the cast as the narrator, while Phillip Gulley plays him as a young man and Curtis Belz plays his friend Danny. The boys are well matched and well played, as are their fathers: David Warner as the worldly scholar David Malter, and Bill Karnovsky as the brooding and long-suffering Hasidic Reb Saunders.
Fine as they all are, and despite what the play has to say again and again about the power of silence to reveal us to ourselves and to each other, the great strength of this play is in the language — in the beauty and the poetry of the writing. Perhaps that's because the novel came first, and so it lives naturally more by the spoken word than the visual action. This is powerful and inspiring writing that reveals much about the human condition, and that seems to insist that whatever our religion, whatever our age and whatever our politics, we are bound together by our common humanity — perhaps not a bad thing to remember during the contentious and challenging days we now face.
Chaim Potok was born in 1929 in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Poland. He became a Conservative rabbi at age 25, was a writer and editor and, in 1967, published his debut novel The Chosen, which became a bestseller and was then made into a 1981 film with Rod Steiger. Googling his name will reveal that and a great deal more about him, including the fact that he died in 2002 of cancer.
But the author's backstory is of less consequence than what happens on the Shimberg stage, and that is a great deal.
I imagine that there may have been some subtleties and fine nuances related to Judaism that I missed, because I did not bring into the theater much knowledge of that religion. But at the Sunday afternoon performance, a largely Jewish audience with a rabbi or two in attendance gave the production its rapt attention. At the play's moving conclusion, the audience rose not enthusiastically and wildly to its feet, but rather slowly and thoughtfully — one person at a time, now in this row, now in that row — until almost all were standing, until all were clapping.
Dorothy Smiljanich is our guest critic this week. CL editor David Warner has a role in The Chosen. He was not involved in the writing or editing of this review.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2008.