The road to becoming ‘truly Jewish’
Bid for belated bar mitzvah sees divorce lawyer delve into greater questions of faith and religion
The idea behind Bar Mitzvah Boy, Mark Leiren-Young’s new play, has been with the writer for years. But it’s taken decades for all the pieces to fall into place.
“Back when I was in my teens, I remember a friend of mine saying he never was truly Jewish because he had never had a proper bar mitzvah,” the 55-year-old Victoria-based playwright said. “That stuck with me as a great idea for a story. But I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to be.”
At first, he thought it might be a movie. Then he decided on a play with two characters — the main character and a rabbi.
“It was figuring out who the rabbi was that was the missing link,” he said.
Bar Mitzvah Boy is the latest play from Leiren-Young. Last fall, his riff on Shakespeare, Shylock, had a successful run at Bard on the Beach. He’s a journalist and filmmaker (his short The Hundred Year Old Whale is currently touring festivals). He’s also a memoirist (Never Shoot a Stampede Queen). His most recent book is the non-fiction account, The Killer Whale Who Changed the World (2016).
In Bar Mitzvah Boy, a successful divorce lawyer (Richard Newman) decides he needs a bar mitzvah. To his surprise, it’s not as easy as he had thought. His desire leads to deeper conversations about religion and faith with a rabbi (Gina Chiarelli).
“I lifted a lot of things from a lot of friends’ lives,” said Leiren-Young, who had his bar mitzvah as a teen, just a couple of kilometres from Bar Mitzvah Boy presenter Pacific Theatre.
The script for Bar Mitzvah Boy won the 2017 Jewish Playwriting Prize, a chance to workshop the play in New York.
“I was dealing with a couple of very serious actors who, in terms of looking over the script, were as thorough as anyone I’d ever worked with,” Leiren-Young said. “I think my favourite question was, ‘Do you want this to be a period or a question mark?’ They really put me through my paces.”
Also discussed were the details around Jewish religious life and the character of the rabbi.
“The director worked with religious consultants to make sure I was on solid ground in terms of the realism of the rabbi and the discussions they were having,” he said.
While working on the script, Leiren-Young met with Vancouver rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan.
“We talked about faith and religion, and various aspects of being a rabbi,” Leiren-Young said.
Pacific Theatre, which is in an Anglican church, was the playwright’s first choice to mount the show’s premiere.
“When I was reviewing (theatre) for The Vancouver Sun, I saw a lot of stuff at Pacific, and I was really knocked out by it,” he said.
Leiren-Young also sought suggestions from Pacific Theatre artistic director Ron Reed for other two-person plays he should read.
“I was looking for great examples so I could study the structure,” he said.
Leiren-Young ended up admiring Armstrong’s War, a 2013 twohander by Colleen Murphy: “I spent an awful lot of time dissecting that.”
He reached out to the Canadian playwright to ask if he could read the then-unpublished script for Armstrong’s War, and if she would look at Bar Mitzvah Boy.
“I wanted to ask if she had any advice on how to improve it,” he said. “I was especially concerned with whether there was anything in the story that wouldn’t track for a non-Jewish audience. Colleen gave me a few notes suggesting areas I could clarify and told me it was time to stop fussing with the script and start sending it out to theatres.”
Now, with the play about to launch, Leiren-Young says his relationship with the Jewish faith is stronger than it’s been in a long time.
“It (writing the play) got me talking to rabbis. I’ve gone back to shul, I’ve spent some bit of time at a synagogue in Victoria. I think I’ve spent more time there than had I not written the play, and gone back to questions of faith and religion and community.”