THE JERUSALEM DISEASE

Directed by Jesse Kellerman '01

At the Loeb Experimental Theater

Reading Period

On a campus where original undergraduate creative writing is rare enough, Zachary L. Shrier '99 should be applauded for writing and producing The Jerusalem Disease, whatever the critical response. And the board of the HRDC should be encouraged to continue selecting and enabling undergraduate-written productions: especially those productions that involve new people in the theater community and that excite the audience. And I have rarely seen an audience at Harvard respond so favorably to an undergraduate production as to The Jerusalem Disease, produced in the Loeb Experimental Theater during reading period. Harvard actors don't often come out for a second curtain call, even for brilliant acting and a stellar script.

And The Jerusalem Disease was neither wonderfully performed nor exceptionally well-written; instead it was a very watcheable soap-opera: "Dawson's Creek" featuring skinny guys in tassel loafers. In fine post-adolescent form, the play melodramatizes the trivial and passes lightly over the truly significant. It is hard to imagine anybody in the audience actually caring about the conflicts the play poses; even the protagonists seem strangely nonchalant about what would strike most mature people as the play's central conflict--an alleged teenage suicide--preferring instead to fight about who is dating whom and what pain is caused by the breaking of a teenage heart.

As in a soap-opera, the conflicts in The Jerusalem Disease are simple and easy to identify with, especially for a college audience: the protagonists are boys just out of high school struggling with the questions of adjustment to adult life and the formation of adult identities. But, also as in a soap-opera, the setting is unusual enough to excite the audience to interest; in the case of most television teen soap-operas, what makes the setting unusual is a remarkably generalized beauty, a kind of atmospheric attractiveness that immediately romanticizes the proceedings, however trivial. Here, there's a quite different kind of exoticization of the banal: these post-pubescents are forced to grow up in Israel--and they're Orthodox Jews.

The Orthodox world was foreign to most of the theatergoers (although a remarkable percentage wore Yarmulkehs, and laughed and applauded for thesame reason that it is enjoyable to look at familyphotoalbums: the amazement of seeing yourselfportrayed so perfectly): the manners of dress andmodes of speaking, the particular theology andphilosophy, the approach to modernity and theconflict between the secular and the sacred.

Shrier's protagonists, who have grown upcomfortable with secular America despite theirOrthodox upbringing and Jewish schooling, arespending time in Israel after graduation from highschool, theoretically devoted to the study oftraditional Jewish texts. They are exposed to amore radical brand of Orthodoxy, and they do notknow whether change is good, or what change meansfor their unformed identities. Some of the boyschange more than others; some put up a brave frontto protect themselves from change; one boy, it isalleged--and here's the ostensible dramaticmotivation for the play--commits suicide becausehe is confused and distressed by the Yeshivaatmosphere.

The boy doesn't die, of course. The moral ofthe story, as we learn in the play's clumsyclosing monologue, is that adulthood is aboutchoice. This idea about the dangers of growing upwas revelatory when we, growing up, actually beganto discover it for ourselves: it was notrevelatory when we figured out that this was thesubject of The Jerusalem Disease, and itbecomes boring by the time Shrier actually forceshis narrator to explain it. The unsubtlety of theplot is compounded by the clumsiness of thedirect-address monologue through which the moralis conveyed: the play begins and ends with thecentral character, Noah Feldshriber--played byJuri E. Henley-Cohn '00--helping the audiencethrough any possible confusion.

But this is a play by a learning author: itsweaknesses are inevitable, if sometimes painful(as when, in the play's most emotional moment, twoof the students scream at each other because itseems that Efi Weisbard, driven by his newreligiosity, convinced Jason Rosner's sister toquit the tennis team), but its strengths are oftenredeeming. Shrier's dialogue is usually very goodand can be very funny, as well: he does awonderful job of capturing, and director JesseKellerman '01 does an admirable job of harnessing,the quirks and mannerisms typical of the subjectcommunity. In a play whose strongest point was itssensitive and accurate portrayal of OrthodoxYeshiva life, the actors were perfect incarnationsof Orthodox teens: Jeremy Bronson '02 especially,playing the serious student Weisbard, bore an eeryresemblance to a hundred people I knew in my(Orthodox) high school. If The JerusalemDisease can focus on moments of stunningtriviality and can move clumsily, it is alsoalmost always energetic and verbally quick-witted.

This energy owes much to the script, whichwisely--in the best teen soap-operatradition--does not dwell for too long on anyparticular mini-conflict but also to the actors,who as a group were much better with movement andmelodramatic expressions of emotion than withsubtle feeling and delivery. Matt MacInnis '02(playing Jason Rosner) is a very good andconvincing screamer; Henley-Cohn is a fine stagepresence, and has a considerable amount of(misplaced, in this play) sex appeal; and JayChaffin '00 (as the rebellious Elliot Dachs, butreminiscent of nobody more than Seinfeld's George)has a very good sense of comic timing, despite atiresome tendency to yell a great deal more thannecessary.

Many of these actors, most noticeably MichaelRosenberg '01 and Jared Weinstein '00, areobviously inexperienced and are obviously actingvery hard. But here too, as with the play itself,it is admirable that inexperience was given achance, that so many new actors were brought intothe theater.

If there are weaknesses, they are forgivable inlight of the newness of the experiment and inlight of the overall strengths in the play. Likethe best in teenage television, which is oftenquite good, The Jerusalem Disease isclever, driven by sharp if sometimes unfathomableemotions, ultimately entertaining, and a very welldrawn portrait of a foreign world