Pass the philosophy and hold the showdowns
Play churns out a stream of confrontations and revelations
The Passover seder draws a blueprint to freedom. It is not just escaping slavery, but welcoming instead of othering, remembering and honoring instead of denying and forgetting and hiding.
The family members in “In Every Generation” don’t have to conceal their ritual celebration of the Jewish holiday, at least not for now. Yet their promised land remains a shell to be filled in. The prayers they recite at the dinner table don’t spell out whether they’re still free if their people’s gains are always conditional and tenuous, if hate and violence never fully subside but only bide their time.
So the three generations in Ali Viterbi’s chewy play, now in a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley West Coast premiere, must find space between their ceremonies.
Here they hash out who gets to claim Jewish identity, what claiming entails, what its responsibilities are and how those questions interact with uneven distribution of privilege within American Jewry and beyond it. They double down or revise their positions as decades go by and their lives change. Whether it’s 2019, 1954, 2050 or 1416 B.C., arguing during a seder is both a right and a burden.The arguer is safe enough to have time and energy to argue, but not so safe he or she can simply be.
For Paola (Luisa Sermol) and Davide (Michael Champlin), staying alive, identifying openly as Jews and looking out for their own are paramount, given what they survived and lost during World War II. For their daughter, Valeria (Cindy Goldfield), religion is suspect for the way its institutions can protect no-goodniks such as her rabbi ex-husband. For Valeria’s adopted daughter, Devorah (Sarah Lo), religious study provides connection to a faith and family identity where ethnicity and genetics can’t, while for her birth daughter, Yael (Olivia Nicole Hoffman), religion is “inherited trauma,” but one she seeks to contextualize in the rest of the world’s traumas.
At its best, the play, which opened Jan. 21 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, offers some novel definitions that themselves help liberate: What if Passover were a “sexy” holiday, with prayers as teasing then very serious foreplay for a couple starting a new life?
Maybe the promised land is openhearted candor. “Husband and wife need to tell each other everything. Good and bad. Is only way to be free,” Paola tells Davide, as she’s still learning English in her new country.
Maybe it’s knowing the full story of who you are and
where you come from.
Yet “In Every Generation” churns out showdowns and revelations as if they’re on a runaway conveyor belt. The family members nitpick, undermine, full-on attack, counterattack, then huff into silences. Rinse and repeat. Religious debates zigzag into disputes over end-of-life care, body shaming and racial privilege, as if every possible issue that might inflame the subconscious must come to a rolling boil all at once.
That onslaught is much less exhausting then it could be, though, thanks to the refined direction of Michael Barakiva and an ace cast. Barakiva expertly delineates what’s fresh about each fresh hell, how one jab wounds differently, more harshly than the last.
Sermol astonishes as Paola, both as a brash, brusque grandmother but especially in her recently immigrated youth, where everything she says might presage into tears, but of what sort? So tremulous does she make Paola’s new life that joy, confusion, grief, exasperation, fear and earnest curiosity all commingle all the time. If she stretches out one feeling from that ball, she keeps it elastic, like a master baker kneading dough, so that she can morph it into something else in a blink or a breath.
Even she, however, can’t paper over the play’s didacticism. “In Every Generation” frequently comes across as instructional pageant,
“In Every Generation” frequently comes across as instructional pageant, something you might see as part of your religious education.
something you might see as part of your religious education. A drab, inchoate set by Nina Ball and a lifeless movement sequence at the play’s end only contribute to the dutiful, impersonal feeling of sitting through a service you don’t believe in, however much you might wish you could.