On Being Jewish

By * T.E. Kalem

Broadway has attempted the impossible so far this season--theater without plays. In this drama vacuum, we have been offered illustrated record albums, scissors-and-paste adaptations of short stories and documentary racial preachments.

Like a bridge player with an unbiddable hand, drama passes again in Unlikely Heroes: 3 Philip Roth Stories.

Right off, the title is a giveaway. Can anyone imagine that the writer's name would have marquee pulling power, except for Portnoy's Complaint? Under the circumstances, it might have been cleverer to adapt the novel. After all, simulated masturbation poses no problem for the contemporary stage. However, it is almost a conditioned commercial reflex to exhume the early and lesser work of gifted men.

Universal Malady. The three short stories involved here, Defender of the Faith, Epstein and Eli, the Fanatic, have been faithfully adapted by Larry Arrick from the original late '50s texts. Indeed, he might have been better advised to put the evening together as a reading, since the interpolated narrative quotations from the stories create the impression that one has wandered into a library rather than a theater.

Defender of the Faith concerns a World War II trainee (Jon Korkes) who practices a kind of coreligionist blackmail on his sergeant (David Ackroyd) to secure special privileges for the camp's Jewish contingent. Between the laughs and the plot twists lurks the question of where ethnic solidarity begins and ends. Epstein, the funniest of the tales, focuses on that universal malady, middle age. Epstein's morale has drooped in exact ratio to the sag of his wife Goldie's breasts. In the title role, Lou Jacobi, who looks rather like a Levantine Walter Cronkite, is hilarious, wistful, bewildered and altogether human. Epstein has an affair with a sprightly widow. But, under Jehovah's unblinking eye, there is no sin without atonement.

Unitarian Solution. The last story, Eli, the Fanatic, borders on mysticism. Its chief characters are a lawyer in a Brooks Brothers suit (Michael Tolan), his very pregnant wife (Rose Arrick), a Talmudic scholar (Lou Jacob!) and the scholar's helper (David Ackroyd). The assistant is a bearded D.P. who survived a concentration camp with only the ghetto garb of a black suit, small prayer shawl and broad-brimmed hat.

This outfit and the scholar's yeshiva students outrage a Jewish suburban group that looks on Unitarianism as rather a nice solution to any questions of Jewishness. The lawyer is appointed to rid the community of these symbols of religious exclusivity and suffering. But the lawyer undergoes a transformation of identity and winds up wearing the D.P.'s clothing, and beating his breast in ritual anguish. Michael Tolan undergoes this probe of the tribal subconscious with moving sensitivity.

The personal sense of anxiety about being faithful to one's Jewishness gives the evening a curiously dated air. The freedom to be as greatly or as minimally Jewish as one wishes seems to be taken for granted nowadays. What was once a matter of conscience has become largely a question of will and desire.

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