How to Master the Art of Selling Chiam Potock
Art and faith fight it out on the sail in My Name is Asher Lev
Chaim Potok's beloved novel comes to the Segal, courtesy of one of Canada'south nearly renowned directors.
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Is it possible to be both an observant Jew and a slap-up artist? That's the question at the heart of Chaim Potok's 1972 novel My Proper name is Asher Lev, which comes to the Segal this week in Aaron Posner'south accolade-winning adaptation.
For Potok, who died in 2002, the question was clearly not bookish. As well as being a writer and painter, he was an ordained Hasidic rabbi, and his novel burns both with a fervour for the artistic procedure and self-lacerating soul-searching.
Its title graphic symbol is a immature man who, having been brought up in Brooklyn'southward mail service-war Hasidic customs, succumbs to an all-consuming passion to paint. At first his male parent, whose work involves rescuing Jews from Soviet oppression, dismisses Asher's art as foolishness, a distraction from devotion and customs. But as it becomes clear that Asher has no intention of laying down his brushes, community, as well every bit parental, disapproval intensifies.
My Name is Asher Lev is a much-admired novel, only is it a groovy one? In other words, did Potok, who besides wrote the best-selling The Chosen, succeed in answering that opening question in the affirmative?
Director Steven Schipper believes so. "The novel is i of the greats," he explained before plunging into the twenty-four hour period's rehearsals. "Although Potok writes with great specificity about the Jewish community, he transcends his ain culture. As with all great writers, his work has neat universal resonance."
The Montreal-raised, Winnipeg-based Schipper is directing My Name Is Asher Lev equally a co-production with the Imperial Manitoba Theatre Center, which he has been running since 1989, and which is recognized equally one of the most important theatres in Canada. (It briefly became internationally famous in 1995, when Keanu Reeves played Hamlet there, though its reputation rests on much more than than this stellar casting insurrection.) 1 of the RMTC's aims is to regularly bring something fresh from New York, hence Asher Lev, which played off-Broadway to considerable acclamation in 2012.
Posner, who once worked alongside Potok on an accommodation of The Chosen, has concentrated the novel'southward broad sheet down to a cast of three.
"Aaron Posner says he was influenced by one-person shows, by radio plays, and you can sense that," says Schipper. "At that place'due south a lot of narration. But the wonderful matter nigh information technology is he's fabricated the narration interactive, and we have a great thespian, David Reale, who's actually able to engage the audition (as Asher)."
Alex Poch-Goldin plays the men in Asher's life — his father, his uncle, his creative mentor, the Rebbe, etc – while Ellen David plays the women, including Asher'southward mother, an art gallery owner, and Rachelle, a model.
Painting female nudes is obviously problematic within the context of Hasidism. But Asher's most transgressive human action is painting the "cursing" Brooklyn Crucifixion in an attempt to capture his mother'south suffering. Although this can't help simply evoke the white-hot controversies that currently environs the sacred and the pictorial, Schipper prefers to call up beyond the religious response to this painting.
"Is information technology a taboo painting or a painful painting?" he asks. "I think it's the latter, in that Asher exposes the truth nearly his parents and his own life. An artist should disturb, you know? It'south almost proverb: If y'all want to pigment dreidels, if yous want to paint candlesticks, so go dorsum to Brooklyn and do that. But if you want to be an creative person, you take to notice the scream inside of you."
Similarly, Schipper sees the community's condemnation of Asher's life choices as beingness virtually something more complex than, on the ane mitt, the suffocating rigours of religious orthodoxy and, on the other, Asher's determination to merits for himself the joy of life.
"Information technology's so relative, isn't it? Where we may think of the Hasidim equally Orthodox and reactionary, in the long history of Judaism, they might advise they are wonderfully progressive. They brought singing and dancing and joy to both prayer and to life."
Schipper, whose upbringing was Orthodox but non Hasidic, attended Montreal's Adath Israel Elementary in Outremont, then went on to Talmud Torah Schoolhouse and Herzliah High School in Snowdon.
"I recall I strayed a trivial subsequently my bar mitzvah," he admits. "Merely when I went to Bishop'due south and realized I was 1 of iv Jews and the other three were in the closet, I had a render, if not to strict observance, then at least to the wish to stand upwards and be counted as a Jew."
In the stage adaptation of My Name Is Asher Lev, we meet its hero in an creative person's studio in Paris, so it'south not a spoiler to say that, at least in terms of his artistic calling, things turn out pretty well for him (you tin can follow his progress in Potok'southward 1990 sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev). Things oasis't turned out so desperately for Schipper, either; his theatre work earned him the Order of Canada in 2012 and a Queen's Gilt Jubilee Medal in 2015.
"No, I didn't have an Asher Lev experience," he says, when I suggest equally much. "My parents were very supportive of me, though initially they were understandably chagrined to larn I was interested in going into the theatre. I joked ofttimes that if merely they wouldn't have said anything I probably would have dropped it like everything else."
AT A GLANCE
My Name is Asher Lev runs from Sep. xi to Oct. ii at the Segal Heart, 5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. Tickets $45 to $60; under 30: $30; students: $24.50. Call 514-739-7944 or visit segalcentre.org
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Steven Schipper revealed to me that his starting time big break was being deputed past Guy Sprung to direct Sam Shepard's The Unseen Hand in 1980. Sprung's delivery to discovering new talent is on testify this week from Lord's day, Sept. xi to Saturday, Sept. 17 when his company, Infinithéâtre, unveils the results of its playwriting initiative, The Unit, with a series of staged readings.
The readings are as follows:
On the Line, by Patrick Pietrykowski (Sunday, 3 p.m., Grove Hall, 165 Châteauguay St., Huntingdon);
Amour, Escape by Travis Martin (Tuesday, 7 p.m., Galerie MainLine Gallery, 3905 St-Laurent Blvd.);
Love U: The Grad School Musical by Joel Yanofsky and Peter Curtis (Wed, 7 p.m., Segal Middle, 5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd.);
Birthmark by Stephen Orlov (Thursday, 7 p.m., Centaur Theatre, 453 St-François-Xavier St.);
The Lie Speaker by Joanna Gosse (Friday, 7 p.yard., Centaur Theatre);
Yev by Alison Darcy and Joseph Shragge (Saturday, 4 p.k., Centaur Theatre);
Successions by Michaela Di Cesare (Sat, 7 p.m., Centaur Theatre)
Admission: Donate what you can. For more information, telephone call 514-987-1774 or visit infinitheatre.com
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