Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
These lines by the Jewish poetess, Emma Lazarus, are inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. To her people, the Jews, America has been another Promised Land. They have been enslaved by Pharaoh Ramses II to build his tomb and Moses had led them out of bondage in Egypt. During the time of the prophet Nahum, they had been held in captivity by King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. They had been driven away from Iberia by the Catholic sovereigns of Spain and marooned on small islands in the Mediterranean. In Tsarist Russia, organized massacres – pogroms – had been carried out to reduce their number. In Nazi Germany they had been experimented upon like guinea pigs by Hitler’s scientists or thrown by the hundreds of thousands into the gas chambers. And the Jews are God’s Chosen People.
Is it any wonder that they have an outrageously ironic sense of humor?
And yet, despite the cruel tricks that their history have inflicted on them, the Jews have survived. It is because they have their laws – the Torah, their tradition – the Mishnah, and their gift of tears and laughter.
They must have wept and laughed with joy when the early Jewish emigrants from Poland, Eastern Europe, the Ukraine, and Russia beheld the Statue of Liberty when their ship steamed into New York Harbor. With high hopes they had come to the land of milk and honey. It was also the land of Mammon and the high Yankee dollar.
In their new land, they found the freedom guaranteed all Americans of whatever race or religion by the country’s Founding Fathers. Those inclined to the religious life became rabbis and built their synagogues. Those who were not, the mercenaries, became shopkeepers, green grocers, money lenders, businessmen, tinkers, cloth merchants, tailors, laundry men, and Broadway playwrights.
Be that as it may, all – rabbi and usurer and everyone else in between – are bound together by the Torah and the Talmud and as a closed socio-religious unit, they look down on the gentiles as the pariah.
All of the above may well be the preface to Repertory Philippines’ opening production for its 84th season, Jeff Baron’s Visiting Mr. Green. This play was presented at the William J. Shaw Theater, Shangri-La Plaza Mall and then at the Carlos P. Romulo Theater, RCBC Plaza Bldg. until July 21.
The play is directed by Zeneida Amador and co-director Michael Williams also stars in the production with veteran actor Miguel Faustmann.
Mr. Green (Faustmann), a retired 80-year old dry cleaner is almost bumped near his apartment on New York’s Upper Westside by a car driven by Ross Gardiner (Williams), a 29-year old corporate executive. Charged with reckless driving, Ross is sentenced by the local police court to render community service that requires him to help Mr. Green at his place once a week for six months.
Divided into two acts and nine scenes, the play traces the relationship between the two characters who initially do not seem to have anything in common as they have been brought together only by an unfortunate near-accident. By the time they are seen in the last scene, a strong bond of friendship has grown between the two and each one has become a better human being as a consequence.
At the beginning, Mr. Green is a cantankerous old buzzard who lives alone like a hermit in his fourth-floor walk-up. He is not friendly to his neighbors. He is distrustful of strangers like Ross when he comes one Thursday evening on his first visit. The young business executive has anticipated the icy reception. He has brought an offering – food – knowing the old adage that "the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach." And an important revelation in the play is made – that Mr. Green is Jewish as Ross also is. Yes, Ross assures him, that the food is kosher, ordered from the best deli in the Upper West Side, Shapiro’s.
The thawing of the ice, however, is short-lived. The following Thursday, the old goat doesn’t seem to remember him. He had slipped and couldn’t get up from the floor by himself and Ross has to do some instant doctoring. He finds the medicine chest along with the cupboard, the crockery and a secret compartment in the cabinet full of old letters and used greeting cards. And another revelation is made – that Mr. Green has a daughter, Rachel.
She had broken Jewish law and tradition when she married a goy, an uncircumcised, unclean gentile. To Mr. Green, her husband might as well have been a lantuch, a harmless demon who dwells undetected under the fireplace until someone sneezes whereupon this homegrown entity involuntarily responds with "Gesundheit!"
Through the years, Rachel had been in contact with her mother and given her three grandchildren. Now, Mr. Green needs to inform her of her mother’s death and ask her to come home to pay respects at her mother’s grave.
Ross, too, has his own deep, dark secret – he is gay. His own father cannot accept the fact. He believes that God created living things in pairs: "male and female He created them," and He ordered them to "go forth and multiply." How can he comply with his father’s commandment when he is homosexual? Even Mr. Green who has become a surrogate father to him enjoins him to marry and "multiply."
The Talmud says that a man should marry at the age of 18 and at 30 attain the peak of strength. By 80, he must have found strength of the spirit. Have Ross Gardiner and Mr. Green found the wisdom of the Talmud?
Baron’s Visiting Mr. Green seems to begin as low comedy and end as a high drama. Significantly, it provokes the mind to contemplate on the force of law and tradition in our time. Is the moral and religious monolith of Judaism – or any other faith for that matter – crumbling to the onslaught of change and progress in this generation?
We may not have the answers, but to ask the question is the beginning of wisdom.