My Name is Asher Lev
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA
Aug - Sept 2011
Director: Aaron Posner
Playwright: Aaron Posner, Chaim Potok
Set Design: Daniel Conway
Costume Design: Olivera Gajic
Lighting Design: John Hoey
Sound Design: James Sugg
Stage Manager: Rose Marie Packer
With: Daniel Cantor, Renata Friedman
This was a play that struck a deep chord with so many of the audience members who came to see the entirely sold-out run in the Berkshires. Often it was hard for me to leave the theater, because many - generally, older - people wanted to talk about the play and the book and the characters, because of the connection they felt to the tale.
A young Hasidic boy discovers early on that he has a gift for drawing, a hobby that’s considered ‘narishkeit,’ foolishness, by his ultra-Orthodox community.
And yet he cannot stop drawing; what flows through him is not blasphemy, it’s not traitorous to his people, but rather the best way he can express truth. His passion for it rivals his father’s passion for traveling and spreading the word of the Ribbono Shel Olam (master of the universe).
What of course happens is the ultimate rupture between the young man, Asher Lev, and his Hasidic world.
Potok’s novel - and Posner’s adaptation - is Lev’s stirring defense of what he’s done and how his entire life led to the point of drawing his mother, his father, and himself in two paintings titled “Brooklyn Crucifixion I” and “Brooklyn Crucifixion II,” his resulting excommunication, and his dealing with the consequences.
photos by Stephen Sorokoff
Fun facts!
Potok himself was a bit of an artist, and some years after he published My Name is Asher Lev, painted his version of a Brooklyn Crucifixion.
While clearly a
crucifixion, the
piece is very, as
Potok himself would
say in his book,
“Picassoid,” and a
bit too cubist for
my own thoughts of
what the painting looked like.
After all, it had to be realistic enough that his parents and community immediately recognized the Lev family depicted therein.
