Nathans playwright takes chances

LAURI DONAHUE SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Jason Sherman is one of Canada's best-known playwrights, and possibly the leading Jewish-Canadian playwright of his generation. He has received the Governor General's Award for drama (and been nominated three other times) and the Chalmers Canadian Play Award (twice, along with three other nominations).

Touchstone Theatre's production of Sherman's play The League of Nathans opens in Vancouver March 10. It's about three Jewish boys, all named Nathan, who form a club where they grapple with their faith and identity. When one moves to Israel, the three are dispersed, until years later when a telegram summons the other two to a synagogue in Spain for one final meeting.

Sherman spoke to the Jewish Western Bulletin from his home in Toronto, where he's playwright-in-residence with Soulpepper Theatre.

JWB: The League of Nathans was written in 1992. Has it been updated since then?

Sherman: I revised it in 1994 for a production at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre and made substantial changes to it then. The amazing and, in some ways, the unfortunate thing is that I don't need to change the topical references since the politics haven't changed. The play doesn't seem to have lost its relevance.

JWB: Your play Reading Hebron is a sequel to Nathans. Are you contemplating a trilogy?

Sherman: It's going forward in my head but I haven't committed it to paper. There's a theatre in Toronto that wants me to do it. But before I do that, I want to make a trip to Israel; I haven't been before.

JWB: How have your plays been received in Vancouver?

Sherman: It's probably the city outside Toronto where most of my plays have been seen. Norman Armour did a [Rumble Productions/Pi Theatre] production of Three in the Back, Two in the Head [about the son of a murdered Canadian scientist who goes looking for justice at CIA headquarters] and it got a review in the Georgia Straight asking why my plays weren't done by professional theatres in Vancouver. Shortly thereafter, three or four of my plays were done there and Reading Hebron won a Jessie Award for best direction.

JWB: You're called "the bad boy of Toronto theatre." How did you earn that title?

Sherman: If you write plays outside the framework of "four people in a farmhouse with a body in the bathtub," you're doing dangerous theatre. Reading Hebron has antagonized audiences but it's also thrilled audiences.

JWB: Broadway producer Anita Waxman commented that "something about [your] plays makes your hair stand on end."

Sherman: I take it she meant it gets under your skin. There's a type of theatre that doesn't attempt to do anything other than entertain and there's work which tries to do more than that. I don't go out of my way to offend people. Certainly you don't want to bore anyone.

JWB: What's your newest play, Remnants, about?

Sherman: It's a contemporized version of the Joseph story, where he's one of 12 sons of a tailor in Poland in the late 1920s. His brothers are trying to form a union in their father's shop and they think he's spying on them, so they send him to Canada, where he comes to the attention of Prime Minister King, who used to hold séances. So Joseph successfully predicts the war and Depression and ends up living with King. And when a boatload of Polish Jews arrives with some of his brothers, he sends them back to get his youngest brother.

JWB: You also explored the issue of Canada's response to Jewish refugees in your play None is too Many [based on the book None is too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 by Canadian author and labor historian Irving Abella].

Sherman: I never felt it was a full-fledged play – more of a docudrama. After None, I wanted to return to the material. Historical truth can get in the way of a good story.

JWB: What are you working on now?

Sherman: I have a number of commissions, including adapting The Cherry Orchard to cottage country in Ontario around the turn of the last century. I'm writing for American theatre companies, including an adaptation of an Israeli novel called The Rosendorf Quartet and a play about what happens to an American politician who criticizes Israel during an election campaign. Big theatres are for the most part reluctant – even fearful – to do some of these plays, which is why they're being done by smaller and more daring theatres.

JWB: You've also ventured south to work in American television. How do you feel about that experience?

Sherman: It hasn't been artistically satisfying. I was told I was hired for my strong voice and then told to lock that away. There are different parts of your mind that you lose when you're writing for television. When you write in a narrow framework with paint-by-numbers storytelling, you lose your creativity.

JWB: Reading Hebron has been referred to as a "frustrated Jew's condemnation of a place he loved but increasingly could not understand."

Sherman: With reference to the character of Nathan in the play, OK, but replace "frustrated" with "angry" or "questioning." It's a place he grew up told to love and is increasingly frustrated with. It's a play I wrote out of a sense of great anger and people respond to it quite angrily. But you gotta write what you gotta write. A mentor told me, "You write your plays and let the audience find them," rather than write according to market research. If you write for the marketplace, at the end of the day, you have a nice, dead thing.

JWB: What's your relationship with Israel?

Sherman: My plays aren't about Israel per se. They're about Jews outside and Israel's affect on them and vice versa. But as I've been writing these plays, my interest in the country is bordering on obsessional. But I don't want to go for just a week or two and say, "Aha! I've 'got' the country."

JWB: What kind of Jewish upbringing did you have?

Sherman: My family went to a Conservative synagogue, but I think we were Reform Jews. We sort of kept kosher at home but it was fine to go to McDonald's for cheeseburgers. Friday night dinners were special, even if we weren't consciously doing Shabbes.

JWB: Do you see yourself as religious, secular or other?

Sherman: None of the above. I certainly have a faith in something but haven't defined what that is. It's something I'm thinking about.

JWB: What's your view of the Canadian Jewish community?

Sherman: On the whole, it's a very conservative crowd with seemingly great support for Israel. But maybe that's because those are the people who are most vocal. In response to my plays, I've heard everything from "Oh my God, that's me up there" to "How dare you, you self-hating Jewish bastard!" [Except for the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre], Jewish theatres won't do my plays. Artistic directors of Jewish theatres tell me they can't afford to politically. I thought we were supposed to be taking chances, but I guess not. Nathans just asks pointed questions about who we are. What does it say when we can't even ask the questions?

The League of Nathans runs March 10-20 at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster at 604-280-3311 or www.ticketmaster.ca.

Lauri Donahue is an award-winning playwright and the rebbetzin of Beth Tikvah Congregation in Richmond.

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