Have you heard the one about the Jewish boy who comes to hate his culture so deeply, and to resent his mother so completely, that he marries a non-Jewish woman as a declaration of his independence? It’s an old one.
I’m not talking about Jewish people who marry non-Jews simply because they’ve fallen in love and believe they’ve found their match. This one is different.
It includes the boy (or girl, really) who so rejects himself that he maligns Jewish women as younger versions of his annoying mother, who believes that to be a modern, vibrant man, he’s got to shed his shtetl roots and find true liberation in the arms of the forbidden.
I was shocked to meet that man last weekend at the Skylight Opera Theatre’s production of Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years.” Nothing I had read before the show indicated that it had Jewish content.
On its face, “The Last Five Years” portrays a failed relationship and marriage in which both parties are guilty, in which the bottom simply falls out and the spouses can’t find their ways back to each other.
The show is made interesting by a technique of parallel-but-inverted storytelling: Jamie Wellerstein, a writer, tells his story forward in time from the day he meets Cathy to the day he leaves her. Cathy Hiatt, an actress, gives her account in reverse, from the breakup back to their first date.
Jamie’s first song, “Shiksa Goddess,” hit my heart like a bomb. In it, he gloats as he hears his mother’s heart splinter and crack 90 miles away, as he imagines his grandfather rolling in his grave.
He’s been waiting for her, he croons, through all the dreadful (my word) Jewish girls and interminable (mine again) Shabbat dinners. “Just as long as you’re not from Hebrew school, I’d say, ‘Now I’m getting somewhere! I’m finally breaking through!’ I’d say, ‘Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess, I’ve been waiting for someone like you.’”
“This might just be interesting,” I comforted myself, pushing down my puffed defenses and resisting my nausea from the word “shiksa.” “Who knew this show had Jewish content?”
The problem was, aside from another reference — a Jewish-themed fable about living your dreams told beside a Christmas tree before Jamie gave Cathy a Christmas gift — that was it. There was no further exploration. The couple’s cultural differences never showed themselves again.
I must say that I enjoyed the show. I was engaged and interested. The music was touching and the relationship’s failures were human and believable.
But Jamie’s unquestioned, unexplored, seemingly unimportant self-hate was creepy.
And the more I think about it, the more it upsets me.
How do you take the monsters out of the closet and then pretend they’re not on stage? How do you reveal a character’s internal revolution and then imagine that it doesn’t matter? Was Jamie’s self-flogging Jewish identity just a decorative part of his character, that did not require exploration or resolution?
Some would be upset by the interfaith marriage. Some might not empathize with a Jew who strays as part of a journey to self-discovery. Others might call my ponderings hysterical or conservative. After all, this is theater, the place to explore issues, to touch the discomfiting.
Mask or essence?
But what bothers me is that playwright Brown treated Jamie’s Jewish self not as a key to his character, but as a costume. And how appropriate that this show, which has been Off-Broadway but premiered at the Northlight Theatre in Chicago, hits Milwaukee during Purim, when Jews deal with masks.
Purim offers us the chance to dress up and masquerade. Though I’m neither religious expert nor theater critic, and though I’ve learned much about my Jewish soul by discovering spirituality in other places, I relish the contrast of Purim’s silliness with its deep, serious messages of self-determination and courage.
Two years ago, I found myself wandering around a moshav in southern Israel, waiting for the end of my sister-in-law’s weekly acupuncture class. I watched a group of children in costume parading through the moshav’s streets for their annual adloyada.
Referring to a Purim parade, the word “adloyada” (a compression of three Hebrew words “ad lo yada”) translates to “until you don’t know (the difference between Mordechai and Haman).” That’s how drunk with celebration Jews are directed to be at Purim, according to the Talmud.
But the juxtaposition was shocking. My brother-in-law had just died, leaving behind Dganit and three daughters, As I watched these moshav residents waving their flags and adjusting their costumes, I was sure that such lightness would never find its way into Dganit’s home just miles away.
But a few days later, my nieces slipped into their costumes, primping and fussing — one as an angel, one as a clown and one in a slightly obscene costume with a whip — and headed for school. And I got it.
Purim lets us get beyond ourselves, our daily costumes. It lets us find the eternal us, the part of us that was present in Shushan, the part that will be alive forever. It allows us to let go of the trappings that hold us in the confines of our daily lives.
And, in Jamie Wellerstein’s case, it might have given him the chance to look past his thrill at capturing a “shiksa goddess” and find something deeper. But I suppose that would be the piece of theater that I would write.
This one, unfortunately, remains a story of self-indulgence and self-loathing, unexplored and unquestioned. Audiences are subjected to the depiction of Jewish self-deprecation and flight as window dressing. And that’s a shame.
In these days of Adar, as we recall Queen Esther, who fasted and prayed to summon her courage to reveal her Jewish self to the king, may we all have the wisdom to dig a bit deeper and see ourselves beneath our costumes. Hag Purim Sameach.
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