When Worlds Collide

My Name Is Asher Lev

by Mark Cofta

Mark Garvin LEV AND LEARN: Asher (Karl Miller, right), a budding artist discouraged by his parents, gets schooled by painter Jacob Kahn (Adam Heller). The lesson: "Art is not for people who want to make this world holy." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Before last Friday's Arden Theatre Co. première performance of My Name Is Asher Lev, adapted from the late Chaim Potok's 1972 novel, I imagined opining about literary adaptations for stage and screen — why a book should never be judged by its movie, how novels and plays use language differently, that artists should create for each medium separately instead of jamming square pegs into round holes.

Then director-adaptor Aaron Posner's production took hold, a fascinating coming-of-age story seamlessly blended with a debate about the nature of art (especially as it relates to religion), and my half-formed objections evaporated.

Karl Miller plays the title character and narrates the 90-minute one-act, explaining a passion for drawing that consumed him through childhood. This Brooklyn Hasidic Jew soon finds that his parents view art as irrelevant at best — "how could lines on paper help anything?" — and sinful at worst (especially regarding nudes — Asher amusingly fumbles to explain the difference between artists' consideration of nudes and pictures of naked ladies to his befuddled parents).

A surrogate father, painter Jacob Kahn, tutors teenage Asher after first trying to dissuade him from art (as everyone does — and as everyone ought to do, so that we have only artists who cannot be dissuaded). This crusty, raving preacher of art's gospel speaks in aphorisms ("Art is not for people who want to make the world holy") and encourages Asher to paint his innermost feelings — propelling a public collision with his parents' views, and his own warring self-image as devout Jew and dedicated artist ("I am a traitor, a self-hater, a blasphemer," Asher confides early on).

Posner wisely never shows us Asher's art; we see it in Miller's passionate performance and the reactions expertly sculpted by Adam Heller and Gabra Zackman as not only his parents, but all the story's other characters. Embraced by Daniel Conway's warm, sparse wooden set punctuated by empty frames; Thom Weaver's otherworldly lighting; and James Sugg's delicate underscoring; the audience sits on three sides in the Arden's Arcadia Stage, invited into a fascinating private world.

My Name Is Asher Lev might never reach the stage as an original play, being somewhat heady and talky, so hurray for literary adaptations. This is a marvelous evening of theater: intimate, sincere, magical. If it inspires theatergoers to read Potok and readers to attend plays, then it will be doubly successful.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

My Name Is Asher Lev | Through March 15, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122, ardentheatre.org