“Americans, especially in California, tend to take from a grab bag of religion and lifestyles in order to find out who they are,” Ghent said recently, “and once upon a time I did that too. But it’s kind of like the monkeys in the old folktale who go into the sleeping peddler’s bag and pull everything out. They try on many different hats but none of them fit and, underneath it all, they are still monkeys.”
The playwright knows from Jewish folktales — and not only those gleaned from her day job as senior editor at the Jewish Bulletin. Since giving up crystals and mantras in 1985 she has made a wholehearted return to Judaism, celebrating her adult bat mitzvah a few years ago at the age of 55.
Now she has a new reason to celebrate. “The Agony of the Leaves,” a romantic comedy she co-authored during a five-year period with Matthew Surrence, a former Bulletin freelancer and Oakland Tribune colleague, will bow in staged readings beginning Thursday at Playhouse West in Walnut Creek.
Part of a new playwrights’ festival organized by artistic director Lois Grandi, the work alternates in repertory with “A Package for Max” by John Angell Grant.
Ghent not only wrote aspects of her former self into the character of Goldie, the indifferently Jewish artist who was hurt by love and salving her psychic wounds with New Age remedies, but a part of her also is in Elliott, the man Goldie falls in love with.
“Elliott is kind of a T.S. Eliot wannabe,” she noted, adding that the name is not exactly a coincidence. “His full name is B. Elliott Winston, changed from Barry Elliott Weinstein, but he’s not turning away from Judaism per se but from who he is — a Jewish guy from Queens. I did a little of that too.”
Ghent, herself a New York City native who now lives in Palo Alto, spent her junior year of college in Scotland — where she tried to stop being Jewish and being American, adopting a kind of phony accent, which the Brits refer to as “Middle Atlantic.”
“What I didn’t realize was how ridiculous I was,” she says in retrospect, “and neither does Elliott.”
The play is about intellectual pretension and holistic mysticism, but it also is about being single and the fear of commitment that keeps people apart and alone. In this respect, art imitates life as Ghent spent 12 years on her own before remarrying in 2000.
“It was like I went through a chute into a place where I didn’t know the language or the customs,” she said of the period following the end of her first marriage. “It was hellish, like something out of Sartre. We brought some of that into the play.”
The collaboration with Surrence came about not only because both were journalists — she substituting for the food editor at the Oakland Tribune and he working as food staffer — but because they both went to an Amway meeting, seeking to better their lot.
“The guy from Amway kept asking, ‘What do you really want to do with your life?’ the assumption being that you’d make so much money from Amway you could do whatever you wanted,” she related. “So, I went home and thought about it and I knew that what I really didn’t want to do was work for Amway. But I did want to write this play. I talked it over with Matt and he agreed. And in 1995 we went to work.”
The final product, however, was not the play the duo originally wanted to write.
“What this play really is about, on one level, is two people running away from their roots,” she explained. “This makes them rootless. They need to reconnect.
“And this, I think, is true of a lot of Jewish people. But I also think that, when you run away from your essence, you do so at your own peril. For me, Judaism has been a way of getting integrated; of knowing how to live your life.”