The Chosen
Runs through Sept. 28 at American Stage, 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 163 Third St. N.
St. Petersburg, $39-$49, $20 student, $10 student rush, americanstage.org.
What’s really remarkable about Chaim Potok/Aaron Posner’s The Chosen is just how much ground it covers in only two acts.
First there’s the play’s main theme, the evolution of the friendship of young Modern Orthodox Jew Reuben Malter and Hasid Danny Saunders over the years 1944-48. But then there are subjects as important as the rebellion of sons who can’t or won’t live up to their fathers’ hopes, the study of Talmud as a lifetime vocation, the conflict between Freudian and behavioral psychology, the founding of Israel in the shadow of the Holocaust, and even the workings of the Hebrew number-system called Gematria. In the fine American Stage production currently onstage in St. Petersburg, Potok and adaptor Posner bring all these items to our view not superfluously but as necessary layers of a complex experience. The result is a moving and illuminating play that respects the intelligence not only of its characters but of its audience. I only wish that more American dramas sustained this level of storytelling.
Reuben and Danny meet at a baseball game during which the latter hits a line drive into the former’s face. Visiting Reuben at the hospital – the damage isn’t lasting — Danny admits that he’d wanted to kill his opponent with his at-bat, and is perplexed as to why. Even this brief confession is important: Danny will turn out to have an abiding interest in psychology, an interest which he hides from his father, the leader or “tzaddik” of a Brooklyn-based Hasidic group that views all secular knowledge as irreligious. Danny’s relationship with his powerful dad is a source of some distress for the young man: Reb Saunders won’t speak to his son except during Talmud study, even though he’s grooming him to one day take over his community. Reuben’s father, on the other hand, is at home in the larger world. A passionate Zionist, he writes articles and gives speeches about the dream of a Jewish homeland, and feels as comfortable discussing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as he does citing Herzl and Ben-Gurion. These distinctions are far from trivial: again and again Reuben and Danny’s friendship is threatened by Reb Saunder’s conviction that the elder Malter is an “apikoros”— a renegade Jew, more gentile than the gentiles. As time passes — as World War II ends and the enormity of the Holocaust becomes public knowledge — Reuben and Danny have to contend with personal, political, and religious differences that at some moments are too wide to bridge. But their will to remain friends is powerful. And they share a rebellion against their fathers’ expectations.
T. Scott Wooten’s staging is superb. He has the play’s narrator — a grown-up Reuben played perfectly by the talented Dan Matisa — remain onstage throughout the action, so we in effect join him as he watches his memories unfold. Matisa’s Reuben comes across as intellectual, self-confident, a bit ironic, reticently wise — in short, a likable, credible guide through another time and world. As Reuben’s younger self, David Friedman is instantly ingratiating, appearing to bring a mind without prejudices into a milieu — Reb Saunders’ court — where the battle lines are sharply drawn, and a wrong word or unguarded comment can mean immediate humiliation.
But it’s the pleasant Justin LeVine as Danny Saunders who faces that embarrassment 24 hours a day; living in close quarters with his mercurial father, he has to keep much of his thinking quarantined, or face the rage of a tzaddik whose personal authority extends far and wide. As that tzaddik, Joseph Parra is only partly successful. In Act Two, he’s intimidating enough, but too often in Act One he seems a good-natured, lovable Tevye, not at all the imposing, imperious figure on whom so many lives depend. David Sitler as Reuben’s father David Malter offers a different problem: he comes across WASPy and not Jewish, a figure from John Cheever rather than Saul Bellow. But there’s nothing a bit wrong with Jerid Fox’s evocative set, representing the Malter and the Saunders home offices, each one built on a foundation of books. Saidah Ben-Judah’s costumes are just right — notice the fringes peeking out from the Hasids’ coats — and Xena Petkanas’ lighting could hardly be improved. This is a strikingly good-looking production.
Do you have to be Jewish to enjoy The Chosen? Not anymore than you have to be Catholic to read Flannery O’Connor or gay to be impressed by Angels in America. This is a notably intelligent play and should speak to anyone who’s ever made contact with someone on the other side of the many lines that divide us.
If Reuben and Danny can remain friends, well, there’s hope for all of us. And if I read this right — there is.