“There’s something bigger than Phil.”
Mel Brooks, “The 2000 Year Old Man”
by Jeff Grygny
The young man, dressed in a black suit, stands before his friends. He lets a black ribbon dangle from a small black box he’s holding: a tefillim, an amulet that Hasidic men wear when praying. With samurai-like concentration, he winds the tape in a complex pattern around his fingers, then spiraling up his arm. Another box goes on his head. Then, eyes closed, he softly recites a fervent prayer in Hebrew. He’s auditioning, in a sense, for a place in the ancient sect of the Hasidim.
There’s no disputing that Trayf, Lindsay Joelle’s comic drama currently playing in a winsome production by Next Act Theatre, is a very Jewish play. It’s more Jewish than Fiddler on the Roof. As with everything about religion, and maybe particularly this millennia-old tradition, it’s layered with fractal complexities; Trayf skims over them lightly, like a sailboat on deep waters. It’s mostly about two teenaged boys on a mission to save the world.
They’re thrilled with the job; adolescents are heroic at heart. Zalmy and Shmuel live in Crown heights, Brooklyn, a hotbed of the Chabad Hasidim under the visionary Rabbi Schneerson (baruch hashem). The “Rebbe” had decided that, to confront the twin traumas of the holocaust and secularization, the Hasidim would circulate New York in “Mitzva Tanks,” trying to kindle enthusiasm for Orthodoxy. It was whispered that if they can achieve a certain number of the faithful, it will trigger the redemption.
And so the boys are set loose in a reconditioned cargo van with a load of tefillim and Shabbat candles, to “awaken the Jewish souls” of their fellow New Yorkers. They also bring twizzlers and cassette tapes of the Rebbe’s talks and their favorite Yiddish devotional music, tackling their quest with the high-fiving glee of athletes facing a big game.
The fresh-faced, scraggly-bearded Alex Mitchell and A.J. Magoon marvelously capture the glory and agony of being 18. But while Shmuel is a nervous stickler for the rules, Zalmy is willing to play loose, even showing curiosity about the trayf: the temptations of the profane world that surround their sacred community on all sides.
Enter Jonathan, a music store manager ( do you remember music stores? it’s the early 90s) who, it turns out, has just discovered that his recently deceased father’s family were refugees from the Holocaust. Against Shmuel’s trepidations, Zalmy invites him to his home for shabbat. Jonathan finds himself deeply drawn to the security and intimacy of Orthodoxy; meanwhile, Zalmy starts hitting him up for mixtapes and other trayf goodies.
This is a play about insides and outsides: Jonathan wants in, while Zalmy is increasingly yearning for the great world outside. The vulnerable Shmuel is threatened by all this, and drama ensues.
A different playwright or director might have highlighted the insular, menacing side of the true believer, but Joelle and Director Elyse Edelman hew to the characters’ humanity: Jonathan comes off as a wounded soul, not a future reactionary. As Shmuel, Mitchell’s adolescent roar perfectly captures teen frustration; while Magoon’s Zalmy embodies a psyche in turmoil between worlds. In a late scene, he dances alone under a streetlight. We hear, REM’s “Losing My Religion,” but he forwards the tape before the song reaches it’s title lyric. Then we hear the plaintive croon of Prince:
Feel like I’m looking for my soul
Like a poor man looking for gold
There’s thieves in the temple tonight
Is this some kind of trayf mitzva? Who knows? But according to Joelle, Zalmy’s boundary-crossing character is based in part on stories her ex-Orthodox friend used to tell her.
In the role of Jonathan, Lucas Prizant shows us a young man whose savoir faire masks a certain moral numbness; how far is he willing to go to gain access to the temple? And, as his estranged girlfriend Leah, Rachel Zientek keeps it real in her single powerful appearance.
It would be hard to imagine a more fully-realized production: the acting is impeccable under Edelman’s confident direction. Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s set summons the energy of 90’s Brooklyn, where everything happens in public.
Trayf lets us peek into a corner of another universe and see things there that we can easily recognize. It also gently and compassionately reminds us of the inescapable truth that the security of “us” also creates the possibility of a dangerous “them.” But doesn’t the Kabbalah teach that G_d is in everything?
Next Act Theatre presents
Trayf
by Lindsay Joelle
Playing through October 4