On religion, jazz and
playing 9 characters at once
A conversation with
Charlie Varon
about Rabbi Sam
Click here to print this interview.
QUESTION: Rabbi Sam is your first new full-length play in nine
years. What took so long?
CHARLIE: Two years of being stuck, three years doing shorter monologues, and three years working on Rabbi Sam. And in the middle somewhere, a year collaborating with Dan Hoyle on his show Tings Dey Happen.
QUESTION: What was the genesis of Rabbi Sam?
CHARLIE: Three years ago, through a strange sequence of
events, the president of my synagogue asked me to give the sermon at Yom
Kippur. I am not a rabbi; I felt unqualified; I got to work. I treated
the sermon as I would a short play: I wrote, rewrote, and rehearsed with
my collaborator/director, David Ford.
In
the sermon I talked about the Old Testament prophets, the Book of Jonah,
Hurricane Katrina, and Cindy Sheehan. On the pulpit I was nervous; I felt,
again, unqualified. But afterward, people in the congregation kept thanking
me for saying what was on their mind.
Now I knew: I had chosen the wrong career. I started looking at catalogues
for rabbinical schools. But rabbinical school takes five years. I can
write a play in two to three. And so I found myself at work on Rabbi
Sam.
QUESTION: Is Rabbi Sam the rabbi you would be?
CHARLIE: No no no! Well, actually, yes and no. Like me, Rabbi Sam wants religion to come alive, take chances, and be like jazz - an improvisation on tradition. But he's a political animal, a former tax attorney, and fearless with power and money. I am none of those things.
QUESTION: The music for the show is composed by a jazz pianist, Bruce Barth.
CHARLIE: Bruce and I went to high school together in New York, where he still lives. One day, I noticed he was playing at the Plush Room in San Francisco, and we got together. This was early on in the development of the play. I read Bruce some stuff I'd written, he began improvising at the piano, and I felt this surge of energy. In addition to being one of the top jazz pianists in the country, he knows Jewish music. He's woven Jewish melodies into his compositions for the play.
QUESTION: You developed the show at Jewish venues, doing work-in-progress performances at Jewish theaters, community centers and synagogues. How have those audiences responded to the character of Rabbi Sam?
CHARLIE: Some people want him to be their rabbi. Others are horrified. Which is not that different from what happens in the play. The eight members of the congregation's board of directors are split.
QUESTION: And non-Jews - what's their response?
CHARLIE: A few people have told me Rabbi Sam reminds them
of the new priest or minister who shook things up and divided their community.
Others have said that even though they're not Jewish, they've been in
meetings like those in the play. All this was a big relief. I was worried
non-Jews wouldn't relate to it.
But in a way, I think the real divide in the audience - and for that matter
in the play - is not between Jews and non-Jews. It's between different
spiritual personality types: believers versus atheists, innovators versus
traditionalists, seekers versus skeptics. This idea, that across cultures
and religions, human beings fall into these spiritual types, was introduced
to me by my friend Huston Smith, the scholar of world religion. It's been
fascinating to explore the implications of that through my characters.
What's curious to me in this light is that almost every audience member
I've talked to, religious or not, has told me they love Sarah Schimmel.
She's the character who most directly challenges Rabbi Sam, and she is
a resolute atheist.
QUESTION: What other ideas are you wrestling with in the play?
CHARLIE: How can religion be true to both tradition and the times we live in? When is the tradition a gift and when a trap? What do you do with the stuff you can't stand in the Bible? What do you do with science? What changes when you go from solitary spiritual pursuit to people trying to do religion as a group?
QUESTION: This is a long way from the political satire you did in Rush Limbaugh in Night School.
CHARLIE: The play I performed in 2000, The People's Violin, was about Jewish identity, and though I had no idea when I was writing it, it led me back to Judaism and to a spiritual search. Then, in 2002, I did a show called Ten Day Soup - David Ford and I created a bunch of monologues from scratch in ten days. I hoped working fast and furious might lead me to the idea for my next play. Looking at Rabbi Sam now, I see that many of the themes in the play were ones I started working on in Ten Day Soup.
QUESTION: Is Rabbi Sam a comedy?
CHARLIE: David and I are trying to figure out how to describe the mix of comedy and drama that my work has become. After a show of mine a couple years ago, a friend of my mother-in-law said, "I prefer the funny Charlie to the philosophical Charlie." But my work has evolved and I can't go back.
QUESTION: What's it like playing nine characters in a single scene?
CHARLIE: Not as hard as I thought it would be! I have the advantage of having lived with these characters for three years. The breathing can be hard - the characters interrupt each other a lot. I work with a kind of sparring partner, Jeri Lynn Cohen, one of my favorite local actors. Jeri Lynn and I will go through each scene, with me playing just one character and her playing the rest. Then we'll switch, and I'll play another character. We keep doing this, until I've played all the characters. In the case of the board meeting scenes, we run them nine times. That helps.
QUESTION: Some of the board member characters are named after rabbis you know.
CHARLIE: I needed a lot of last names, so I used some names of local rabbis I know or have studied with: Lew, Baugh, Kahn, Richman, Goldblatt. A token of my esteem.