‘The Chosen’ Is Subtly Powerful Drama

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents The Chosen in the Quadracci Powerhouse, March 5 – 31, 2024. Pictured: Hillel Rosenshine, Ron Orbach and Eli Mayer.

The warmth and cerebral kinships of the late Chaim Potok’s 1967 best seller, The Chosen, inspire the best parts of the Milwaukee Rep’s current mainstage offering. It frequently amuses us and certainly engages our thoughts beyond what some may take as a Jewish justification for the troubles its people endure.

The play reaches deeper, exploring the philosophy and reality of how clashing views can exist side by side in this world. Set in Hassidic Brooklyn in the 1940s, with conflict on a makeshift baseball field erupting into lifelong friendship and entanglement for two Jewish families of quite different sects (one orthodox conservative, one more liberal), the play builds on Potok’s original sly humor and delight in intellectual competitiveness.

It was actually a well-received movie back in 1981, with Rod Steiger and Robbie Benson as the more explosive rabbi father and his gifted but troubled son — and this “The Chosen” is not to be confused with the current dramatic series and movie with the same title about Jesus’ followers.

In a co-production with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Rep simply uses four strong actors and subtle technical intricacies under adapter and director Aaron Posner, a frequent Rep collaborator and leading figure in regional theater as both playwright and director, to replay with feeling the original Potok novel and much of its dialogue.

One of the teen boys is the warm wry narrator telling the story – Reuven (actor Eli Mayer) whose fury over being beaned by a baseball gives way to a grudging recognition and affinity for Danny (actor Hillel Rosenshine) despite Danny’s stricter sect, side curls and intense upbringing.

Mayer remains throughout a relaxed engaging presence who must win the audience over to his story, even when required to melt into dumbfounded perplexity. Rosenshine is correctly a clenched jaw moving toward emotional openness, occasionally breaking out in panic over his secrets, such as love for literature by Hemingway, Freud and Darwin (much despised by his father as goyim). His stern father treats Danny as heir apparent to the rabbinical throne.

Their fathers are a strange contrast, albeit united by adherence to the Talmud. Danny’s father is a strict, distant, almost metaphysical rabbi, played as a powerful burly bear by Ron Orbach, and Reuven’s a warmer, physically unimposing, matter-of fact intellectual played by Steve Routman.

The play plunges through the dialogue interaction of the boys and the influence of their fathers as a world war gives way to emerging outrage over the Holocaust. Disagreement over how to react to the horrific news splits the Jewish sects. This was not about anti-Semitism, but about Jews disagreeing with Jews — resistance by the most religious to the concept of a secular Jewry in Israel versus the fervent belief among other Jews that only a nation called Israel would mean survival.

The boys and we the audience learn from these debates while director Posner offers a rolling lesson in how to make theater catch us up in words and tiny shifts in attitude.

The Rep is investing $75 million in restructuring that will add a flying loft for scenery and other improvements to the Powerhouse theater space, but Posner is exploring both the reaches and the limitations of the current setup. Actors and stagehands work quickly in blackouts to adjust desks and other spaces, a need to operate in the dark that may diminish in the future. Perhaps not the central reason for the redesign, but it plays a part.

The excellent set by Daniel Conway (glowing wood floor and upstage cubicles for diverse purposes) still requires pools of lighting from Noele Stollmack to flash our attention one way or the other.  Joshua Schmidt’s sound design of radio news and sudden echoing voices also drives our point of view, while director Posner thoughtfully but too frequently isolates the protagonists from each other in space and sometimes in short dialogue exchanges with blackouts.

He lets the words carry humor through the characters’ conciseness and stillness rather than haw-haw jokes. One of his choices is to turn a numerological debate into an unexpected vaudeville-style routine.

The final 20 minutes have the most difficulty in gripping our attention as the play seeks too hard for explanatory speeches and resolutions. The fathers – Orbach as the sometimes-anguished rabbi from the old ways, Routman as the thoughtful scholarly type – can be accused of being stereotypes in dialect, but Routman in particular humanizes the type he is playing and Orbach brings considerable force and passion to the play’s most difficult mood-shifting part.

Unless memory deceives me, Posner without violating the historical nature of the piece has made a few subtle changes – elevating the central debate about clashing viewpoints that seem irreconcilable. (Many thought in the 1940s that the split views in Hassidic communities would never come together to support a nation in the Mideast.)

Aside from asking patrons to embrace the power of talkative theater and social thought, perhaps The Chosen is also speaking gently but pointedly for today, where it sometimes feels that you can’t hold empathy with both Israeli citizens and the Palestinians.

The Chosen will perform through March 31 at the Milwaukee Rep’s Quadracci Powerhouse. For tickets, visit https://www.milwaukeerep.com/shows/show/the-chosen/ or call 414-224-9490.

The Chosen Gallery

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Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.