Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Julie Tepperman, directed by Aaron Willis
Convergence Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto
February 10-27, 2010
Yichud (Seclusion) is much more successful as an event than as a play. The self-translating title refers to the law in Orthodox Judaism that unmarried men and women are not to be left alone together. In an arranged marriage the couple may have had a few chaperoned dates, but their very first time alone with each other is at their wedding after the exchange of vows when they are deliberately left by themselves in the “yichud room.” Playwright Julie Tepperman’s imagining of what might be said under such circumstances was the root of the play and is still its most effective scene.
Fifteen minutes before show time, the wedding begins in the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace which designer Beth Kates has brilliantly transformed into the interior of a synagogue. You enter into a joyous atmosphere of celebration as wedding guests dance to music by a live klezmer band. However, when the play proper starts Tepperman delves into the anxiety behind the scenes. We see tensions flare between the bride Rachel (Julie Tepperman) and her mother Malka (Diane Flacks) and between Malka and her husband Mordechai (Richard Greenblatt), who plan to divorce soon after Rachel’s wedding. The groom Chaim (Aaron Willis) is so petrified he has acquired asthma symptoms and is ridiculed by both his brothers--Ephraim (Jordan Pettle), who has moved to Brooklyn, and Menachem (Michael Rubenfeld), who has stayed in Toronto.
Tepperman’s intention may be to put Toronto’s Jewish Orthodox community on stage in all its diversity, but, except for one scene, the action plays out like the pilot for a generic sitcom that happens to have Jewish characters. In that one scene Ephraim and Menachem vent their anger at each other before confessing the different pressures each feels as yeshiva teachers. Yet, since their conflicts are not resolved nor those of Rachel’s parents, the play feels incomplete. The cast gives fine performances and Willis’s direction is fluid. By the end we feel like onlookers at a lively celebration for two people we do not know that stops just when we start to take an interest in them.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-02-11.
Photo: Jordan Pettle, Julie Tepperman, Aaron Willis, Michael Rubenfeld and Chorus.
©Keith Barker.
2010-02-11
Yichud (Seclusion)