One City, One Story — The Chosen

By Shamrock McShane

In the theater of war on terror, we all know the subtext: it is Israel.

Chaim Potok's novel, The Chosen, adapted for the stage by Aaron Posner, and directed by Lauren Caldwell is just getting off the ground.

"This is just day three of rehearsal, and it's the first day we'll actually be up on our feet," the veteran Broadway actor David Brummel, who plays the Orthodox Jewish writer David Malter, tells me in the Hippodrome's third–floor rehearsal room.

Lauren Caldwell walks the set, pointing out the contours of the design, but more importantly, the boundaries and where they lead. "This space works best when there's energy crawling from all corners."

"The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself," the narrator tells us in The Chosen. "One is to acquire a teacher. The other is to choose a friend."

Can there be any doubt that no one could have been a better friend to Danny Saunders, a teenage boy seemingly destined to follow his father as the leader of a community of Hasidic Jews, than Reuven Malter, and vice versa?

The Chosen is above all a story of the friendship of Danny Saunders, played by Elya Ottenberg, and Revuven Malter.

"We have about eight different options for the start of this play," Caldwell tells Michael Toth who plays Reuven as a young man. "Let's try starting by having you discovered."

"It was 1944," Reuven tells us, "the war was raging in Europe, and Europe was raging in Brooklyn."

There follows a catalogue of ethnic diversity, culminating with the Jews, "including the Hasidim."

It is at this moment that Reb Saunders, Danny's father, the Hasidic tzaddik (Howard Elfman) enters. "You feel his presence and acknowledge it," Caldwell directs. "You don't have to look at him, but we can't ignore each otheršs energy in the space. Howard, what is Reb coming in for?"

"He's been strolling through the streets of Brooklyn."

"All right. Then we have to establish that you are outside, and when you get upstage center and the Brooklyn Bridge is behind you, pause, and let's print that in the audiencešs mind. Let's say to them: these are the rules for the evening."

When Toth as the narrator reaches the line "To prove that Jewish boys were good Americans," Michael Littig as Young Reuven takes the stage.

"Let's switch the energy here," Caldwell directs, staging the moment by transposing the two actors, narration blending into action as one actor melds into another.

The brave idea behind the Hippodrome State Theatre's "One City One Story" is that there exists an idea that can hold a city in thrall. Judaism is a religion that honors learning, wisdom, and books.

The nation of Israel is built on an idea. "The slaughter of the six million Jews," Chaim Potok reflects in The Chosen, "would have meaning only on the day a Jewish state was established. Only then would their sacrifice begin to make some sense; only then would the songs of faith they had sung on their way to the gas chambers take on meaning; only then would Jewry become a light to the world, as Hašam had forseen."

To the notion that God gave Israel to the Jews, Reb Saunders fires back, "God will build the land, not Ben Gurion and his goyim."

And yet in the light of the six million — that's more Jews than live in either the United States or Israel today — the sovereign nation of Israel came into existence in 1948.

There are nearly six million Jews in America now. That's a little less than half of all the Jews in the world. Can humanity possibly realize how precious a commodity that is — even in a world that knows nothing besides commodities?

And yet what Mark Twain said still rings true. "There isn't one square inch of the worldšs surface in the possession of its rightful owner."

Civilization itself advances only so far as societies not only tolerate but positively value Jewish culture. Without that, there is no Spinoza, no Marx, Freud, Einstein, Proust, no Chaim Potok, no David Mamet. I wouldn't want to live in a world without Jews.

The Chosen runs through March 25 at the Hippodrome State Theatre.