REVIEW: MY NAME IS
ASHER LEV
By Aaron Posner
Adapted from the novel by
Chaim Potok
Directed by Kimberly Senior
Produced by TimeLine Theatre
in Chicago
At Stage 773 through October
18, 2014
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| Alex Weisman as Asher Lev, Lawrence Grimm as the Father, Danica Monroe as the Mother |
When I was 12 years old I
read a book that changed my life. It was The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I marveled at how Potok was able to
capture the beauty of Judaism and at the same time depict a secular world with
exciting baseball games, the joys of literature and the ideas of Western
thought. Then The Promise and My
Name Is Asher Lev came out and I was
hooked.
Potok’s book My Name Is
Asher Lev struck home for me
personally, since Asher was an artist and I was in theatre and a singer. For me
the creative impulses of being an artist and a Jew came from the same spiritual
place. I found a Judaism which lived and breathed through storytelling, humor,
song, dance, performance and textualities coming from Judaism’s ‘thousands of
years’ dialectic with Torah and Talmud. Also the Judaism I followed had
experiences in chavurot or small
fervent communities with ecstatic prayer, meditative practices, and creative
experiences. It is no wonder that Chaim Potok was one of the leading lights for
the Chavurah Movement of young Jews, starting in the 60s and 70s.
The play of Asher Lev is set against the landscape of a world where it is
dangerous to be a Jew, where the wonder of life cries out to be explored
through creative expression, and about the intense passion from a Chasidic way
of life that. Showing the pressures on Asher and his Chasidic family in a 1950s
household in Brooklyn after the Holocaust and during the reign of Stalin in the
Soviet Union, the play takes place when Jewish communities were rebuilding
their lives. The parents, who are emissaries – shluchim – for the Rebbe the spiritual leader of their
community, have to deal with an inquisitive and creative son who is passionate
about “idolatrous” art, which is anathema to their world. While doing the
Rebbe’s work, Asher’s mother suffers the loss of her brother and she goes into
a deep depression.
Asher, in the play as our
narrator, looks back in time and describes his predicament living with a
depressed mother and his yearning to create art. As we the audience hear his
tale, we long for him to leave his home and find himself. Eventually he goes on
to study art (through a recommendation by the Rebbe) and he grows up to become
the thing that his parents do not want, a famous artist.
But as Asher narrates, he
speaks as though disembodied, without much connection to his parents, to
Judaism or himself. It is telling that in the talkback discussion after the
show, Alex Weisman the actor who played Asher, responded to a question by
saying that he believed the play is more about the parents than it is about
Asher Lev. This basic misconception of Potok’s intent was apparent from the
performance and this production.
Purposely, Potok uses Chasidism
because it is a branch of Judaism known for emphasizing the awe in the universe
that can be found in every human action, from the trivial to the portentous. It
is a Judaism that leads the person in prayer to the celestial heights. It is
filled with music, dance, storytelling and intellectual discourse, and even, at
times, through drink and wild merriment.
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| Alex Weisman as Asher Lev |
Sadly, director Kimberly
Senior gives no emphasis to how Asher’s artistic passion is related to his Chasidic roots. A fine
director (great work in Northlight’s The Whipping Man), I am sorry to say that this play gets away from her. Its deep themes of spiritual and Jewish content are not evident in her
work with the actors or in the staging.
An example, Asher is supposed to have payos
(side hair curls) that Chasidic boys and men grow out. They are
continually referred to as a major part of his identity. Yet he doesn’t have
them and looks quite “reformed Jewish” (Weisman words describing his own
Jewish upbringing, in the talkback).
A missed historical detail is
in the costume choice for the Rebbe. Astonishingly he comes out in a modern
synagogue-style tallit (prayer
shawl), rather than, either, a traditional Polish-style coat and shtreiml (fur hat) or a large fedora typically worn by the
Lubavitcher Rebbe -- the sect Potok used as the inspiration for this fictionalized sect, as the Ladover.
A more important scene is when Asher, who is now taking classes
in an artist’s studio, is going to paint a live nude model for the first time. This
scene entirely loses its world shattering impact for
Asher, because the female model partially disrobes for only a second and Asher
barely registers it. Yet this moment should have been a telling one for him. Afterwards he tries to explain it to his parents, about why drawing
nudes is so important for an artist. Clearly, in the script he is
affected and brought to some sense of the mystery of the female body, as a
transcendent and revelatory moment. But on stage it seemed rushed and
embarrassed.
A bizarre production choice
is the fact that Asher, who is constantly drawing, shows his pictures to his
parents, yet nothing is on the page. He then posts them on a large wall and
before us are a lot of blank pieces of paper looking like a lot of ‘post-its’.
It is emblematic of this production, that where we look for the art from the
page, we can’t find it conceptually on the stage.
Most importantly, a major theme
of the play is the question of Jewish identity and the need for healing the
world and the Jewish people after the trauma and losses of the Holocaust. Yet in
this production the Jewish specificity is a mundane story of
generational conflict, creating a blandness throughout.
Asher’s parents go to his gallery opening and see his painting “Brooklyn Crucifixion,” a painting of his
mother on a cross at his gallery show. Potok’s point, and what
makes his work so interesting, is that Asher appropriates and transforms this
symbol into a Jewish one for a post-Holocaust era, bringing Chagall’s “White
Crucifixion” to mind. Going back to his Chasidic roots to bring the Moshiach “now,” the Messiah who will redeem the Jewish people and the
world, Asher paints what is deep in his soul and even within the soul of his
people. Ironically, it is this painting that shakes his parents to their very core as Jews, yearning for their son to embody the values they believe in. Though we see shock in his parent’s faces when they see the piece,
the lack of a performative Jewish concept in the production and the way the scene is played, leaves the moment colorless.
