‘A WALK WITH MR. HEIFETZ’ NEEDS TO PICK UP THE PACE

Adam Green and Yuvgal Boim

HENRY EDWARDS  - New York - February 21, 2018

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I lived in Los Angeles’s fabled Malibu Colony and Jascha Heifetz, perhaps the greatest violinist of all time, was my next door neighbor.

Arthritis had crippled the musician’s fingers, disallowing me the opportunity to hear him engage in his daunting daily regimen of scales, études and various other practice routines. I did spot Heifetz peering from his window once or twice and caught a glimpse of him emerging from his house on another occasion.

 In 1987, the violinist succumbed to complications from a fall at the age of 86.

 That I was ever going to chat with the legendary instrumentalist or have the unlikely opportunity of walking on the beach with him had simply not been in the cards.

Understandably, I can’t remember the last time Heifetz crossed  my mind – that is until the arrival of British playwright James Inverne’s “A Walk with Mr. Heifetz,” the Primary Stages production at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

If not me, at long last, someone was going to take that walk.

The source material for former Gramophone magazine editor Inverne’s play is the true-life (and probably almost mythic by now) story of what happened when Heifetz (Adam Green) visited British Mandatory Palestine in 1926.  Since the country lacked a concert hall, the world famous soloist concertized for thousands in a stone quarry at the Ein Harod kibbutz.

After the performance, audience member and kibbutz movement pioneer Yehuda Sharett (Israeli actor Yuval Boim), somehow persuaded the brilliant and eccentric violinist to accompany him on a walk and the men walked and talked away the remainder of the night. 

  “A Walk With Mr. Heifetz” consists of two short and very talky acts.

Act One dramatizes the walk shared by the two 26-year-olds, one a renowned musical genius, the other a passionate Zionist.

Act Two takes place 20 years later in 1945 just three years before Israel became a state. 

Instead of Heifetz, who makes only the shortest of cameos, Yehuda’s new conversation partner is his brother Moshe (Erik Lochtefeld), a prominent politician who is viewed as the third most important man in Israel after Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion.

The siblings have not seen each other in quite some time, and needless to say, they have plenty to talk about.

During the course of both acts, big subjects turn up, including war, the Holocaust, the turbulent politics of the Middle East, and especially the complicated and fascinating purpose of music.

But it’s all rather chatty, polite and bloodless in spite of itself. It’s not often that dramatic subjects such as these are treated with a lack of drama.

Heifetz, a child prodigy, was born in Lithuania in 1901, immigrated to America in 1916, and was the most celebrated violinist in the world by the time the 26-year-old performed in Palestine.

Adam Green, who resembles Heifetz, looks especially dapper in costumer Jen Caprio’s bowtie and double-breasted suit. Radiating wealth, fame and a cultivated, self-protective aloofness, the musician listens with exaggerated politeness as Yehuda and he interrupt their walk to rest in front of designer Wilson Chen’s crumbling stone wall.

Yuval Boim’s Yehuda is deeply influenced by kibbutz life and completely taken up with the Zionist dream to create the State of Israel. He dresses in no-frills workers garb, serves a local choir director and is known to his community as a composer with a modest reputation.  The opportunity to talk to a musical genius makes him bubble over with enthusiasm.

While Yehuda talks and talks without making a point, attractive and talented violinist (Mariella Haubs) appears and occasionally underlines the dialogue with evocative musical passages. It helps.

Driven eventually to abandon politeness, Heifetz finally demands to know what exactly is on his walking companion’s mind.

After seemingly endless beating around the bush, Yehuda replies that he desperately wants to develop his talent for musical composition and use his gift for the benefit of his people. 

But Palestine lacks a single opportunity for him to further his studies, leaving no other option but to migrate to a major city in Europe.

Yehuda views such a departure as the abandonment of building a homeland, and nothing less than an act of betrayal.

It’s a position that makes little sense to Heifetz, a single minded careerist (as well as celebrity) with a total dedication to his art that is personal in nature.  The violinist is the last person imaginable who would view music as an expression of nationalistic impulses and a form of communal expression.

Convinced that Yehuda should do what is in his best personal interest, he urges the impassioned young man to go to Berlin and take up his studies there.  It is, he says, "a place where they eat and drink and breathe music. And it's full of Jewish musicians. German Jews there are living a great new dream."

As the act reaches its conclusion, Yehuda makes a decision to act on the advice.

Twenty years later, in 1945, the Yehuda of Act Two, a middle-aged composer and musical director of note in Palestine, is so overwhelmed by depression he has become a recluse.

Brother Moshe’s mission - it is exactly the opposite of that of Heifetz – is to convince Yehuda to return to work and create music that will help to shape a Jewish national identity.  

During their lengthy conversation, we learn that Yehuda did take Heifetz's advice about Berlin, lived there during the rise of Nazism and returned home without incident.

Heifetz's name is evoked in passing.  The violinist refuses to perform in Israel after he "dared to play the music of Richard Strauss,” characterized by Moshe as "one of the figureheads of Hitler's cultural apparatus,” and was attacked with a stick.

"This is a reason for a Jew to attack another Jew?" Yehuda asks his brother.

In 1940, Yehuda lost significant members of his family, including one of his siblings, his wife and the brothers’ mother, in a car accident. Overwhelmed by grief and sickened by the war and the Holocaust, he lost faith in the power of music, prompting his decision to abandon the world.

The tide turns favor of Moshe’s argument when he plays a recording by Viktor Ullmann, recorded after the Austrian born Jew was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and never stopped composing.  

An inspired Yehuda grasps that his mission is to do his part to help the fledging nation forge a cultural identity.

“A Walk With Mr. Heifetz” has been directed by Primary Stages Artistic Director Andrew Leynse. Yuval Boim and Erik Lochtefeld do their best and their performances are best characterized as “earnest.” Adam Green has it easier since his talkfest is shorter and funnier.

Inverne’s play brims with intriguing ideas and major historical events that scream out for dramatization.  That play has yet to be written.

Information and tickets for Primary Stages’ 2018-19 season: PRIMARY STAGES 

Adam Green, Yuval Boim and Mariella Haubs

‘MLIMA’S TALE’ IS ALL ABOUT GREED

Sahr Ngaujah with Jojo Gonzalez and Ito Aghayere in silhouette behind him (Photo: Joan Marcus)

HENRY EDWARDS  - New York - May 12, 2018

It’s been said Lynn Nottage isn’t on a mission to save the world, but as a sensitive and engaged citizen and human being, occasionally she believes one of the world’s myriad problems cries out for action—and, since she’s a playwright, that usually means writing a play. 

Two of those efforts, “Ruined” (2009) and “Sweat” (2017), received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Nottage is the first woman to win this award twice.

“Ruined,” a dramatization of the plight of women in the civil war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, conveyed the agonizing message that rape is a profoundly damaging weapon of war and must be stopped.

“Sweat,” the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era and a portrait of the America that had come undone, dramatized the disaffection and racism of white working-class voters in the rust belt of Pennsylvania.

“Mlima’s Tale,” Nottage’s new play at The Public’s Martinson Hall, chooses as its subject one of the largest, most shadowy criminal trafficking networks in the world, the $10 billion a-year ivory poaching trade.

That one elephant is killed every 15 minutes is all you need to know to appreciate Nottage’s concern.

If her play was documentary drama, one of those elephants undoubtedly would have been title character, Mlima ("mountain” in Swahili), a decades-old Kenyan bull elephant and "one of the last of the big tuskers.” Each tusk was 10 feet long and weighed 198 pounds.

Around 25 elephants currently exist that are genetically disposed to grow tusks so big they sometimes reach the ground.

Actor and director Sahr Ngaujah, who is of Sierra Leonean ancestry, portrays Mlima. Ngaujah is perhaps best known to New York audiences for playing another title role, that of the late Nigerian singer Fela Kuti in the musical “Fela!”

Bristling with intensity and remarkable athleticism, he delivers a majestic performance that effortlessly captures the physical, emotional and spiritual grandeur of the mighty animal. Ngaujah is such an arresting visual presence you can't take your eyes off him.

Mlima lives in the savannas of a Kenyan game preserve and supposedly under the protection of national laws. 

Our first sight of him finds him bathed in moonlight, an imposing silhouette against the bright night sky.

In his opening monologue—it will turn out to be Mlima’s last living words—the elephant utilizes rich, sensory language to tell us “how you listen can mean the difference between life and death. It’s the truth of the savanna, something we all learn at a very young age.”

That ability has proved incapable of sparing him.

Poachers have shot Mlima with a poison arrow (poachers inside parks often use arrows instead of rifles in order not to alert rangers) and his will to live has enabled him to run from them for 40 days.  But he is weaker and they are closing in.

Mlima’s anguished wail shakes the theatre during the agonizing death scene that precedes the poachers hacking off his tusks.

Nottage’s “Ruined” is an adaptation of Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” For “Mlima’s Tale,” the playwright chose the format of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s once controversial 1897 play, “La Ronde,” as her model.

“La Ronde” (film buffs may recall Max Ophüls’s stylish 1950 film version) presents sex as a daisy chain of ten erotic encounters, each a duet in which one character from each scene becomes a part of the next.

Utilizing the same prototype of overlapping lives, “Mlima’s Tale” traces the step by step journey of the fallen elephant’s mammoth tusks as they depart Kenya, travel through several countries while undergoing an increasingly profitable and slimy series of transactions before they reach their final destination in a Beijing penthouse.

Actors Kevin Mambo, Jojo Gonzalez and Ito Aghayere dexterously (and quickly) bring to life twelve participants in the revolving door of a market economy powered by greed and riddled with corruption, deceit and complicity.

The enormously skilled trio relies on restrained changes of body language and accents, a touch of exaggeration and Jennifer Moeller’s costumes to create a gallery of poachers, park warden, police chief, African government official, Chinese collector, Vietnamese smuggler, boat captain, master ivory carver and nouveau riche millionairess art buyer, among others.

In the act of doing business, each character undercuts the one before and lies to the next on the ladder up. Along the way, there are betrayals or pay offs or both.

One person is always in control and one person struggling to gain control. At some point each has the option of not participating but ultimately chooses to participate.

Several times, characters ask for assurances that the ivory was extracted legally, that no animals were really harmed, and that anyone who does harm animals will be punished.

No matter their individual concerns, each ultimately lacks sufficient integrity, allowing greed, moral weakness and self-preservation always to win the day.

Nottage creates these duets with restraint.  Unbridled capitalism and not its wheelers and dealers, each with an understandable (but often infuriating) motive, is the real villain here. Capitalism simply does not allow virtuous behavior or anything resembling it.

As with Brecht, we always know who the winner is going to be and around the midpoint, “Mlima’s Tale” turns wearisome and didactic.

The subject of poaching is nothing new, we share the playwright’s anger about it, and each day’s news about our federal government destroys the shock value of greed and corruption.

What does continue to fascinate is Nottage’s treatment of Mlima after the elephant’s death.

The Maasai believe that if you don’t give an elephant a proper burial, the elephant will haunt you forever. The conviction transforms “Mlima’s Tale” into a ghost story about a murder and the victim’s afterlife.

After the death of the animal, Ngaujah performs a stark, otherworldly dance-like ritual and covers his face and torso with streaks of white paint to represent Mlima’s transformation from regal elephant in life to commodity in death.

While Mlima's body has been deserted, his spirit remains with his tusks.

During every scene that follows, the spirit stands silently and imposingly in the background, observing and listening intently to the negotiations.  Ngaujah smears each of the participants with white paint at exactly the moment the transaction has been completed. The stains are well earned marks of Cain.

During a voyage from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa to Vietnam, the tusks are placed in the cargo hold of a ship. The sight of a partially clad and caged black man inevitably summons thoughts of the Middle Passage, the stage of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were abducted into slavery and shipped to the New World.

Again, self-interest and greed are the order of the day.

Jo Bonney (“An Ordinary Muslim,” “Red Letter Plays: Fucking A”, “Cost of Living”) is a director with an artistic flexibility that allows her to transform a multitude of styles into coherent and satisfying theatrical works.   In the case of “Mlima’s Tale,” her theatrical inventiveness and discipline have been applied to create a show that is speedy, spare and beautiful to look at.

Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalist set consists mostly of an empty box and utilizes a series of sliding panels that fly open and close to reveal multitudinous locations.  No two scenes occur in the same place and each scene is “titled” with an appropriate (sometimes silly) African proverb (“No one tests the depth of the river with both feet") projected on graceful floating screens.

Lap Chi Chu’s richly colored lights make an immense contribution to the spare but arresting stage pictures.

Musician and composer Justin Hicks, visible throughout the performance just outside the stage proper, makes an extraordinary contribution.

Hicks and the sound designer Darron L West miraculously craft a world where “thunder is not yet rain.” We hear animals breathing, insects whirring, and an elephant’s trumpeting roar that shakes the theatre.

In a final speech, Mlima tells the audience, “If you can hear me, don’t come to mourn me,” he tells us, warning the members of his tribe to protect themselves. “Run! Run! RUN!”

The poachers who killed Mlima were offered $500, but were paid half. Ultimately, the tusks fetched a staggering $1.1 million in China.

The agonizing last image of the play takes us a penthouse in China whose owners are delighted to show their newest status symbol, an exquisite ivory set. The lights come down on Ngaujah who has ended up a decorative carving.

 Nottage’s passion is so overwhelming it makes it easy to forgive the monotony that takes over the central portion of the play.

Sahr Ngaujah (Photo: Joan Marcus)