Theatre in Review: My Name is Asher Lev (Westside Arts Theatre)

	Ari Brand and Jenny Bacon. Photo: Joan Marcus

Playwrights find inspiration in all sorts of places, but lately I've begun to feel that they are relying a little too heavily on the bookshelf marked "fiction." All too often, when literature and drama get together, the result is awkward, a half-breed creature with all of its parents' flaws and none of their virtues. Yes, I know there are exceptions -- ranging from Nicholas Nickleby to War Horse -- but unless you have a company of artists gifted with the inspiration, not to mention the time, money, and fortitude, to transmute prose storytelling into theatrical terms, you're probably asking for trouble.

The bad examples have been legion of late. For all the adulation heaped upon them, Gatz and The Select (The Sun Also Rises) -- from Elevator Repair Service, which makes a career of such novel-into-theatre presentations -- were less about Fitzgerald and Hemingway and more about oddball staging concepts. (Why is the entire staff of a construction company acting out The Great Gatsby? How are they going to stage a bullfight in a set that looks like a Barcelona bar?) Then again, Simon Levy's straightforward adaptation of Gatsby, seen at the Guthrie a few years ago, also failed to satisfy. Other equally dismaying examples are currently on display. Sybille Pearson and Michael John LaChiusa have wrestled long and hard with Edna Ferber's Giant; the resulting musical is a mass of undigested ideas and plotlines. The Heiress is certainly playable, but, by all accounts, Ruth and Augustus Goetz fashioned, out of Henry James' elegant circumlocutions, an old-fashioned star vehicle -- it's great when Cherry Jones is in the driver's seat, less so when it's Jessica Chastain.

My Name is Asher Lev is neither the best nor the worst of the recent rash of book-of-the-month offerings. It carves a clear dramatic line out of Chaim Potok's 1972 novel, but it fails to take advantage of what the theatre does best. The title character -- also our narrator -- is a boy growing up in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn in the 1950s. Barely past the toddler stage, he shows an astounding gift for drawing. His father, who works for the local rebbe, is unimpressed, urging his son to put away what he sees as childish things. When the boy insists that he must draw, that he cannot help it, his father replies, "Animals can't help it. A man can always help it."

However, many changes are in the offing. Following a nervous breakdown caused by the death of her beloved brother, Asher's mother enrolls in graduate school, seeking a career of her own, and his father heads for Vienna, having determined that the death of Stalin is creating new opportunities for Hasidism in Eastern Europe. (Regular theatre-going creates strange, coincidental associations; I saw My Name is Asher Lev one night after seeing The Twenty-Seventh Man, about Yiddish writers imprisoned by Stalin.) With the rebbe's blessing, Asher becomes apprenticed to Jacob Kahn, a Mark Rothko-ish painter with an outsized personality, an unbending will, and a knack for epigrams. (When Asher notes that his life has been ruled by tradition, Kahn curtly replies, "This is a tradition. A religion called painting." Another time, giving the boy a baleful look, he says, "You're too religious to be an abstract impressionist.") Kahn's training, to which Asher responds passionately, puts the boy on a collision course with his parents and their way of life; when the break comes, it will happen in public, with devastating results.

Interestingly, the best moments in Aaron Posner's script are the silent ones, when young Asher, confronting a nude model for the first time in his life, takes in the beauty of the female body, or when his parents, attending an exhibition, are stunned to see themselves rendered in a pair of canvases that, as far as they are concerned, are unforgivably blasphemous. Much of the time, however, Posner struggles to transmute this prose tale into theatre, resulting in a mix of narration and half-dramatized scenes that diminishes the source material. Asher narrates the story, which results in many redundancies. ("I gave her the notebook," he says, handing a notebook to his mother. "She studied the drawings," he adds, while his mother ... well, you get the idea.) In order to cram the novel's events into a single 90-minute act, events unfold at a headlong pace, robbing them of dramatic weight. Asher's mother is a radiant figure at the beginning of the play; during her breakdown, which lasts about three minutes, she is a basket case; suddenly, she's fine again. The narration skips lightly over key events; when, having made a splash in the art world, Asher is savaged in a newspaper review, the details of the criticism are withheld.

Most damagingly, the script, in exploring the conflict between decades of accrued religious tradition and a bracingly individual modernist outlook, shies away from exploring the more callous aspects of Asher's personality, especially his decision to expose his parents in public to a pair of paintings that he knows will cause them the most profound distress. "What could I do?" he asks us, looking helpless, in a moment of intended sensitivity that looks more like chutzpah.

Nevertheless, Gordon Edelstein's production isn't dull, thanks to his accomplished cast. As a trio of father figures -- including the rebbe and Jacob Kahn -- Mark Nelson pulls off something of a tour-de-force, creating fully dimensional characters through a combination of technique and force of will. Jenny Bacon is equally accomplished, whether playing Asher's mother, the cynical owner of an art gallery, or a happily complaisant artist's model. Their virtuosity creates real pleasure, which goes a long way toward papering over the script's many awkward moments. She also has what is arguably the script's most honest moment, when she turns to her always-needy son and says, quietly, "You exhaust me." Ari Brand, a promising young talent, is hemmed in by his narrator role, but he is gifted with real stage presence.

The design work is equally impressive. Eugene Lee's set -- essentially a painter's studio, dominated by a large skylight -- is a strongly evocative piece of work that easily accommodates a number of locations. James F. Ingalls' lighting renders the specific qualities of sunlight in Brooklyn, Cape Cod, and Florence with remarkable precision; he also creates a notably lovely auburn wash in the scenes featuring the rebbe. Ilona Somogyi's costumes allow the actors to switch characters with blessed speed. John Gromada's sound design provides a good showcase for his melancholy original music.

But the basic approach results in something that lacks the texture and accumulated insights of a novel, without attaining the tension and excitement of drama. It's not unpleasant, but in trying to serve two art forms, it serves neither.--David Barbour