Posted Date: Monday, December 6, 2004
Story Location: http://www.towncrieronline.ca/main/main.php?direction=viewstory&storyid=4256

December 2, 2004 — 12 Kislev, 5765

You don’t have to be religious to enjoy The Chosen at Leah Posluns

By Barbara Shainbaum
Tribune Correspondent

Although the play, The Chosen, is filled with Biblical learning, Talmudic quotes, and profound Jewish issues, it triumphantly speaks to the encompassing human spirit and not just to a parochial view of Judaism. It’s a thoughtful and moving play based on Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel bristling with splinters of humour that touches on the pulse of humanity and still very relevant today.

Aaron Posner’s adaptation with Potok of The Chosen won the 1999 Barrymore Award for Best New Play. First produced in the United States and then at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, the Toronto run is now directed and produced by Ari Weisberg of Teatron Theatre. The Chosen is the story of a friendship between two Jewish teenagers in Brooklyn during the 1940s. When Danny Saunders injures Reuven Malter during a heated baseball game between their rival yeshivas, Danny visits Reuven in the hospital and a grudging and unique friendship is born. Both come from Orthodox families, but Danny is the scion of a Hasidic dynasty, while Reuven is the son of a professor, a scientifically minded Orthodox scholar. Their two very different Jewish communities are five blocks and a world apart.

“Reuven Malter’s comment that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover brings to focus the premise of the play, that our preconceived notion of who is flexible and who is not, do not always match reality,” says Weisberg in his director’s notes. “In The Chosen, choices have to be made by all as they encounter life’s challenges, difficulties and opportunities. As in the Talmud, the characters debate, consider and in the end find creative resolutions to the questions that life poses.”

Reb Saunders, Danny’s father, tests Reuven on his appropriateness as his son’s friend, while David Malter, seeing his son’s friend’s hungry mind, secretly educates Danny with world literature and Freud. Baseball, spiritual and intellectual concerns draw the boys together. When Reuven’s father has a heart attack, Reb Saunders invites Reuven to stay with his family, but when David Malter, Reuven’s father, gives a fiery pro-Zionist speech, Reuven is forbidden to stay friends with Danny because his father now disapproves. As the boys grow to manhood, they are forced to learn important lessons about each other, their fathers and themselves and the meaning of the Talmudic saying that hangs as a banner in Hebrew on the stage, ‘These and those are both the words of the living God.”

As the grown-up Reuven Malter, actor David Frisch deftly narrates the tale as he looks back on his boyhood. Neil Steen as young Reuven Malter and Benjamin Blais as Danny Saunders both bring a passionate zeal and a steely resolve to their characters off-and-on friendship. Herb Goldstein inhabits the role of Reb Saunders with a grandiose, authoritarian yet loving paternal energy. And Jonathan Siegel invests David Malter convincingly as the more progressive intellectual Zionist father.

Ari Weisberg has done an admirable job of directing The Chosen, making it a vivid and timely theatre piece. You don’t have to be Jewish or religious to enjoy the work. Sure there’s a spiritual quality to The Chosen, but it’s a universal one.

This Teatron Theatre Production runs from Nov. 27 to Dec. 12 at the Leah Posluns Theatre. For information and tickets, call 416 781-5527.

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B’nai Brith Canada

The Chosen: A play to exercise your brains

By DAVID SILVERBERG
Special to The CJN

Adapting a good book into a play can produce theatre that will attract readers. A Toronto theatre company will test this theory by staging one of the most celebrated novels of contemporary Jewish literature.

The Chosen, Chaim Potok’s best-selling novel, will run from Nov. 27 to Dec. 12 at the Leah Posluns Studio Theatre.

The company, Teatron, chose Aaron Posner’s adaptation, which includes “some foreshadowing from the book’s sequel, The Promise,” says artistic director Ari Weisberg.

The play’s theme centres on religious tolerance, Weisberg says. The Chosen traces a friendship strained by differences in 1940s Brooklyn.

A chassidic boy, Danny Saunders, meets a modern Orthodox boy, Reuven Malter, at a baseball game and they develop a bond tighter than the labels attached by their families.

A question surfaces from this friendship: which way is the right Jewish way?

Behind the conflict over religious divide is the subtext of father-son relationships, Weisberg says.

“Reuven is a straight-thinking practical person who is very close to his father, and spends every evening studying Talmud with him. Danny’s father is more old-country Europe with a removed and silent parental approach.”

This dichotomy brings up the issue of education and whether teaching children one way excludes other possibilities.

What divides the fathers most is Zionism. Reuven’s father hopes for the creation of a secular Jewish state while Danny’s father, a rabbi, considers that desire blasphemy until the coming of the Messiah.

Weisberg admits the tempo will be fast-paced to capture all these situations, so “the transitions between the 19 scenes dissolve into each other,” he says.

Not only will Potok’s writing be one of the key attractions, Weisberg adds, but the American author’s ability to balance the various conflicts is a director’s wish come true.

The Chosen stars David Frisch as Reuven, Herb Goldstein as Reb Saunders, Jonathan Siegel as David Malter, Neil Steen as Young Reuven and Benjamin Blais as Danny.

First adapted by Aaron Posner in 1999, The Chosen won that year’s Barrymore Award for Best New Play and has since been staged across North America.

Posner collaborated with Potok a year before the award-winning author died, and they tweaked the format to fit the stage: Reuven is the on-stage narrator who unfolds his memories as they happen.

Teatron patrons are hungry for intellectual theatre, says Weisberg. “The plays we choose can work both on the surface as an interesting story and also have a subtext so rich and intriguing that people can’t help talking about it for days.”

Teatron offers an outlet for those ideas by hosting a Thursday night discussion after the show. Weisberg and the cast will talk about the play’s questions “that affect lifestyle decisions Jewish people live through.”

Weisberg says The Chosen allows thinkers to exercise their brains. “It’s open-ended so when you leave the theatre, you can come up with your own way of how the characters end up.”

The Chosen runs from Nov. 27 to Dec. 12at the Leah Posluns Studio Theatre, 4588 Bathurst Street. Tickets are $15 to $30. For tickets, call 416-781-5527.