TRAYF


Jewish teen besties find both their Orthodox convictions and their lifelong friendship tested in 1991 New York City in Lindsay Joelle’s TRAYF, the entertaining, enlightening, thought-provoking latest from The Geffen Playhouse.

Zalmy (Ilan Eskenazi) and Shmuel (Ben Hirschhorn) may have grown up a mere dozen miles from Manhattan, but for the two eighteen-year-olds, the world just outside Hasidic Crown Heights—its way of dress, its music, and its attitudes towards sex, dating, and marriage—might as well be oceans away.

The truth is, however, that the Big Apple lies just across the Brooklyn Bridge, and so Zalmy and Shmuel have taken it upon themselves to drive their “Mitzvah Tank” on a God-given mission to inspire Jewish Manhattanites to fulfill “mitzvahs.” (That’s Hebrew for “good deeds done from religious duty”).

It soon becomes clear that despite their identical black hats, jackets, and slacks, their adolescent beards, and the “tzitzit” hanging from their waists, Shmuel and Zalmy’s friendship is a case of opposites attracting.

Whereas Shmuel finds safety and stability in the customs and beliefs he’s been carefully taught (meaning that secular music, dating, and premarital sex are all no-nos), Zalmy can’t help being attracted to the world outside Crown Heights. (He not only knows who Elton John is, he actually spoke to him once, poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, no less.)

Enter Jonathan (Garrett Young), a young record producer who, though raised Catholic, has recently learned that his just deceased father was born Jewish in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Shmuel would rather have nothing to do with a stranger, especially one with no right to call himself a member of the Chosen People given that only his father was Jewish.

For Zalmy, on the other hand, Jonathan represents an entry into (or at least a tantalizing glimpse of) the secular world outside Crown Heights, and so he agrees to school his new friend on Judaism in exchange for pop music mix tapes, the lowdown on sex, and a ticket to a Broadway show.

As Jonathan begins to embrace everything Jewish and Zalmy inches towards a more modern NYC life, it’s no wonder that cracks begin to form in the the duo’s heretofore rock-solid friendship.

Completing TRAYF’s cast of characters is Jonathan’s girlfriend Leah (Louisa Jacobson), increasingly distraught that the man she’d started dating precisely because he didn’t come from the Reform Jewish world she grew up in has started (among other things) unscrewing every single lightbulb in their apartment on Friday nights. (Shabbat rules, you see.)

All of the above adds up to a thoroughly engaging look at friendship, loyalty, love, sex, and what it means to call oneself a Jew–and a play to be savored regardless of a theatergoer’s own religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Though she could have done more to ensure that those seated on either side of the production’s thrust stage don’t have their view of one actor blocked by another, director Maggie Burrows scores high marks where her actors are concerned.

Both Eskenazi and Hirschhorn are instantly likeable and thoroughly believable as young men with limited contact with the outside world.

The former makes for the most winning of Zalmys (and has a smile to light up the Audrey Skirball Kenis stage), and his costar (a Class of 2020 USC grad) is heartbreakingly real as a young man facing the possible loss of the friend he holds dearest.

Young is terrific too as someone at pains to deal with an unbearable loss until a religious epiphany changes everything, and though Jacobson has but a single scene, she absolutely nails Leah’s anger, frustration, and pain.

I’m not particularly fond of Tim Macabee’s too abstract set. (It wasn’t until well into the play that I realized that certain scenes were supposed to be taking place inside a van, though the eleventh-hour surprise Macabee has up his sleeve is a visual treat.)

TRAIF does score high marks for Denitsa Bliznakova’s authentic, character-defining costumes, Lap Chi Chu’s expert lighting, Everett Elton Bradman’s klezmer-meets-‘90s-pop sound design, and KC Monnie’s skate choreography.

Rachel Wiegardt-Egel is dramaturg. Leia S. Crawford is production stage manager.

Casting is by Phyllis Schuringa, CSA. Katie Croyle, Josh Green, and John Garet Stoker are understudies.

It’s a real pleasure to welcome TRAYF to the Geffen’s early-2020 lineup. I laughed. I learned. I loved. What more can a theatergoer ask for?

Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.
www.geffenplayhouse.com

–Steven Stanley
March 11, 2022
Photos: Jeff Lorch

 

 

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