Joy Carlin had no problem getting permission to alter the script of “The Gathering.” The playwright, Arje Shaw, just happens to star in the upcoming Jewish Circle Theatre revival of the 1999 family drama, which Carlin directs.
Alternately comedic and deadly serious, “The Gathering” had a successful New York run on and off Broadway. Carlin now is directing Shaw in the revival, the first time he has performed in his own work. “The Gathering” runs July 22 to Aug. 20 at Live Oak Theater in Berkeley.
Is it awkward directing the guy who wrote the play? Not for Carlin, who befriended Shaw after he moved to the Bay Area several years ago.
“He’s a terrific actor,” she said. “Sometimes he tries things just to get them out of his head, but by doing that he finds things that are really wonderful, and that only he could do.”
Set in 1985, the play depicts three generations of a Jewish American family. It centers around Gabe, an aging Holocaust survivor who has a standoffish relationship with his son, Stuart, but a close one with his grandson, Michael, who is about to have his bar mitzvah.
In the original production (which starred the late Theodore Bikel), Stuart’s wife, Diane, is a white Catholic woman who converts to Judaism. In Carlin’s version, Diane and young Michael are African American, played by Tracy Camp and her real-life son, Kahlil Leneus. It’s a change that alters the psychology of the characters.
“There are underlying motivations for Stuart, and why he married a black woman. He’s starving for his independence and freedom,” said Carlin.
Act 1 establishes the family dynamic, with the garrulous Gabe laying wisdom and Yiddishkeit on his worshipful, pious grandson, preparing him for his bar mitzvah yet making no secret of his disdain for religion.
That doesn’t mean the characters are without secrets.
When Gabe learns President Ronald Reagan will go to Germany’s Bitburg Cemetery, where Nazi-era Waffen-SS soldiers are buried, something in Gabe snaps. He takes Michael to Bitburg to confront Reagan. There, all the family secrets come out.
“It doesn’t tie up that neatly,” Carlin says of the play’s climax. “The way Arje is playing [Gabe], he has the catharsis of everything he’s been hiding all these years.”
Carlin says she was drawn to the play’s deeper themes about human nature.
“It’s about being stiff-necked and rigid,” she says, referring mostly to Gabe’s permanent hatred of Germany, a feeling shared by many Holocaust survivors. “Do you move on or stay stuck in revenge, which you can’t get anyway?”
“The Gathering” is replete with Jewish content, from Gabe’s Yiddish-inflected dialogue, to a fully staged Shabbat dinner, to an impromptu Haftorah lesson Gabe offers his grandson.
For Camp and Leneus, that meant a crash course in being Jewish and speaking Hebrew prayers with a ring of authenticity. Carlin, who is Jewish, helped in that effort, from contributing her personal Shabbat candleholders as props to coaching Leneus, a seventh grader at the Oakland School for the Arts.
Carlin is a fixture in the Bay Area theater scene, both as an actor and director. In 1969, she started a long association with A.C.T. in San Francisco, including as associate artistic director. She served in a similar role at Berkeley Rep, and has directed plays for Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, TheatreWorks and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The Chicago native remembers the real Reagan-Bitburg controversy, and noted how Elie Wiesel, the revered author and chronicler of the Holocaust, stood up to Reagan, telling him to his face that Bitburg “was not his place.”
Wiesel, who died last week at age 87, is quoted in the play.
Carlin is very happy with the production, but she acknowledges a measure of creative tension with Shaw. She chalks it up as part of the process.
“As with any play, you try to get the playwright’s intention across,” she said. “I push it sometimes in ways that Arje questions. But he trusts me.”
“The Gathering,” July 22-Aug. 20 at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. www.liveoaktheater.org