Deep into the stage adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel "My Name is Asher Lev," a painting prodigy's mentor tells the young man, "An artist either reflects life or comments on it."
Theater's ability to reflect life in profoundly meaningful ways is brilliantly demonstrated in two extremely different productions that began performances here last weekend.
"My Name is Asher Lev," which opened the Milwaukee Rep's Stiemke Theater season, is a stunning example of simple but elegant story telling and theatricality. It ranks among the best I have seen at the Rep in my 30 years of writing about the company.
Potok was an American rabbi and author whose work focused on Jewish life and its inherent issues. Published in 1972, "My Name is Asher Lev" is about the internal and external conflicts of an exceptionally talented visual artist born into a devout Hasidic Jewish family. Obedience and loyalty to family, religion and tradition as well as the singular struggles of genius-level artists tower over the story.
The concerns of Neil LaBute's astringent drama "Reasons to be Pretty" seem so small and petty in comparison with "Asher Lev," but they are hot wired into our culture. Self-worth is defined by physical appearance.
Add immaturity, insecurity and the treacherous terrain of adult romantic relationships, and you have a lot of lost and miserable people scarring each other's lives. Renaissance Theaterworks opened an affecting production of "Reasons to be Pretty" that is crackling with emotional truth.
For "Asher Lev," East Coast playwright and director Aaron Posner wrote the best theatrical adaptation of a novel I have seen. Moving a piece of fiction from page to stage is fraught with difficulty. The book must be thinned and the play must be given dramatic shape.
Posner's narration-driven script is all lean muscle employed in the service of a deeply compelling story that spans more than 20 years. The dramatic arc is strikingly palpable.
Young Asher is drawn to drawing when he is about 6, but art is not considered a proper pastime in an insular culture and religion focused on study and piety. Growing up in mid-20th century Brooklyn, Asher is enveloped by his Hasidic community's embrace and in sporadic conflict with his father over his obsession with art.
The sting of his father's disapproval is mitigated some by the wisdom and understanding of the community's rabbi, who arranges for Asher to be mentored by a non-observant Jewish artist. The older artist warns that Asher's distinctive vision will cause pain and estrangement from family and community, but the need to create is so primal, Asher respectfully moves forward with his career.
The drama gives us a taste of the drives and stresses in an artist's life, and we get a vivid sense of the steep price demanded by burning creativity.
Posner fluidly directed this 90-minute production with a spare beauty and an acute visual sensibility that is exquisitely appropriate for the subject matter. Kevin Depinet's wide-open minimalist set is all grainy wood and rough bricks, making for an easy transformation from modest Brooklyn apartment to artist's studio to Manhattan gallery. Two jumbo empty picture frames leaned against the back wall handsomely represent the signature paintings that brought Asher Lev fame and family pain.
The actor playing Asher must repeatedly switch back and forth from narrator to a character who ages from 6 into adulthood. Jonathan Bock's calm and understated presence conveys both Asher's respect for his parents and his Hasidic roots, and his resolve to pursue his unique and disquieting gift, as he calls it.
Cassandra Bissell and Daniel Cantor play all of the other roles, and Bissell's portrayal of Asher's long suffering mother is particularly sensitive.
The language is much rougher and the tone a lot less civil in "Reasons to be Pretty," but the human connection is as achingly real. The play opens with a young unmarried couple who live together engaged in an especially nasty fight. Actually, the aggression is all going in one direction.
Stephanie is furiously spewing four-letter-word invectives at Greg for a seemingly innocuous remark he made to a co-worker about the attractiveness of her face. It's a five-alarm rant, and Milwaukee audiences will be amazed to know that in the Broadway production of "Reasons" the tirade was played at double the shrillness and energy seen here.
A nerve has clearly been struck, and dramatist LaBute repeatedly calls our attention to our culture's preoccupation with physical appearance and our validation of that. But "Reasons" also reflects the unsure and unsettled lives of many American 20-somethings who have yet to figure out adulthood, and it captures the bittersweet pain of unfulfilled love.
Stephanie and Greg's opening scene contains the pyrotechnics, but it is their final scene together that resonates for veterans of the romantic battlefield.
Carrie Coon so completely disappears into the Stephanie character, I didn't recognize her. This fine and confident actress emits an aura of insecure uncertainty.
Lenny Banovez's Greg is squarely on the mark with his likable mix of thoughtful passivity and confusion. Playing Greg's co-worker and sometimes friend Kent, Steve Wojtas thoroughly embodies a suave and buff bully with a veneer of self-assurance. He's plenty creepy.
The drama's fourth character, Kent's wife/Stephanie's friend, fills the one-dimensional role of being the babe Stephanie is not. Georgina McKee gets the most she can out of it.
Suzan Fete once again demonstrates that directing spiky, sharp edged drama is her forte.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
