The chasm between free artistic expression and religious prohibitions on certain images — a timely and charged subject if ever there was one — is explored in Chaim Potok’s 1972 novel My Name Is Asher Lev. Things come to a head when the title character, a young Hasidic artist living in 1950s Brooklyn, is excoriated by his parents for daring to paint not just naked women, but the even more offensive image of the Crucifixion. And with his own mother hanging up there on the Cross to boot!
Aaron Posner’s award-winning adaptation front-loads this climactic clash to the very first scene, before taking us back to the stages that led to it: Asher as a young child revealing a talent for drawing. Asher as a teenager becoming increasingly consumed by his talent. Asher making his painful way from religious Orthodoxy to the full glare of the secular world as his genius is recognized.
There’s a lot of talk in this play about art being fuelled by personal vision, and Posner has very much gone his own way in adapting Potok’s passionate novel to the stage. Using a cast of three — the men and women in Asher’s world are played by just two actors — and a lean 90-minute playing time, he focuses on the essentials of the story, giving us lengthy rhapsodies on the transfiguring power of art while whisking us off to Europe and back to Brooklyn in a couple of lines.
David Reale (foreground, with Alex Poch-Goldin) conveys the guilt of a good Jewish son possessed by the angels and demons of artistic expression in the Segal Centre’s co-production of My Name Is Asher Lev.
As with the novel, Asher narrates his own story, and Posner’s script largely tells rather than shows. But it works beautifully in this intimate and electrifying co-production between the Segal and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, partly because of the spare power of the writing, but mostly because of David Reale’s superbly engaging performance as Asher, and Ellen David and Alex Poch-Goldin’s as his parents (plus sundry models, mentors, art dealers, relatives, religious leaders, etc).
Reale conveys the agony and guilt of the good Jewish son possessed by the angels and demons of artistic expression, drawing the audience into his world of imaginary planes, angles and brush strokes through a performance that glows with focused energy. At one point, he floats off into a creative reverie as his father lectures him on the essentials of faith and community. It’s a moment that’s both painfully indicative of Asher’s wrenching alienation and a deliciously funny portrait of intergenerational misunderstanding.
In fact, it’s a miracle of Posner’s script that he has discovered so many opportunities for humour in the heartfelt but rather earnest source material. Often it’s funny when it’s at its most painful, such as in the fractious dinner-table scenes when parents and child struggle to understand one another, or in the moments leading up to his parents standing aghast before the “blasphemous” affront that is Asher’s masterpiece, the Brooklyn Crucifixion.
As well as drawing superb individual performances from the cast members, director Steven Schipper ensures that things never fall into a state of static wordiness. Reale, David and Poch-Goldin virtually dance around one another in delicately gestural displays of familial love or in a deceptively casual bustle of domestic activity. (Several times, the scrape of a table punctuates a sentence.)
Set, lighting and costumes (respectively, Martin Ferland, Hugh Conacher and Louise Bourret) initially create a black-and-white world — Asher’s canvas-filled studio also stands in for the family home and the Rebbe’s office — which is subtly infused with colour as Asher moves into the forbidden and seductive world of “goyim and pagans.”
It all adds up to an utterly absorbing evening of theatre that is intellectually stimulating and, at times, emotionally overwhelming.
AT A GLANCE
My Name Is Asher Lev continues to Oct. 2 at the Segal Centre, 5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. Tickets cost $45 to $60; $30 for those under 30; $24.50 for students. Call 514-739-7944 or visit segalcentre.org.
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