The tough one: how to watch and absorb a stage play made from a book which was also a movie, when you dearly loved both the movie and the book? And yet, Simon Bock's adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" gives us the opposite problem: how to stop raving about such a brilliant piece of work?
True, there are issues. The side-story, involving stereotype Jews with Brooklyn accents pretending to be the author's muses as he attempts to create the story of his grandparents' lives in the old village, is at best stretched. Perhaps this is meant to illustrate Jonathan's ambivalence about his roots and culture, but it feels cutesy. If there is anything this story is not, it's cutesy.
OK, that's it for niggles. We adored the staging, particularly the way they utilized two chairs, a bench, a suitcase and a steering wheel to illustrate the long road journey the three men and one invisible dog undertake. It showed us how inspired imagination can make the world feel realer than real. Jeremy Kahn's Jonathan seems tailor-made for him, He is a little over-the-top, which is exactly how he should be here. As in all Jeremy Kahn roles there is a slapstick comic inside the man which always seeps out. We can't imagine a better Jonathan.
Alex (Adam Burch) may be even better. He is Jonathan's age, but in his Ukrainian world he has never heard nor read about Ukrainian complicity with Hitler's master-race plans. He neither understands what lies behind Jonathan's quest to discover the village of Trachimbrod, wiped off the map fifty years earlier, nor why his Grandfather (Julian Lopez-Morillas) becomes so violent and non-communicative when the name of the village is mentioned.
Marissa Keltie's various parts, especially the waitress with the attitude, are quite funny and Lura Dolas's old lady, the last person living who remembers Trachimbrod, is memorable. She has her own bitterly vivid tale from fifty years back. We will reveal no more of the story, except to say we miss the sunflowers from the movie. And we haven't changed our opinion that Alex could have gone a little easier on his grandfather.
None of this matters. Jonathan Safran Foer, Director Tom Ross and Aurora Theatre have given all of us a reminder that art may not be able to stop inhumanity, but great art can lift us into a new place, above and beyond the restraints of memory.
RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼
"Everything is Illuminated"
Aurora Theatre
2081 Addison Street, Berkeley
Through Dec. 16
$35-$49
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