(Jewish Group) Seth Rozin's story of the last two Jewish men in Kabul needs more oomph
Think of Samuel Beckett crossed with the comedy stylings of Henny Youngman (kids, Google him) and you’ll have some idea of the thrust of Theater J’s “Two Jews Walk Into a War.”
In Seth Rozin’s labored two-hander, Zeblyan and Ishaq are the last two elders standing in the Jewish community of Kabul. Actually, they’re the last two anything standing among the Jews of Afghanistan’s combat-fatigued capital city. Cranky and mutually distrustful, they meet in their synagogue — cue the sounds of gunfire in the streets — to puzzle over what to do next, as the only other remaining Jew in Kabul has just died.
It’s not a bad setup for existential satire: transplanting, in effect, Neil Simon’s misery-embracing “The Sunshine Boys” to a fading house of worship in Central Asia, where the two men decide that the best use of their time is creating a Torah. This requires Bobby Smith’s Ishaq to dictate from memory the entirety of the sacred scroll to Sasha Olinick’s Zeblyan, who repeatedly makes mistakes that force them to start all over again. The rising mountain of crumpled parchment is a testament to their uphill struggle to preserve their traditions in a deeply hostile environment.
Adam Immerwahr, who left last year as Theater J’s artistic director, returns to the Goldman Theater in the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center to stage Rozin’s comedy. He fortunately has at his disposal two actors who’ve acquired extraordinary skill in the art of kvetching. (For the uninitiated, that’s Yiddish for complaining.) On Jonathan Dahm Robertson’s set of the shabby shul, sniping at each other is what Zeblyan and Ishaq do, as they duel over Scripture, revisit old grievances and debate the possibility of repopulating the city’s Jewish community, which fled in the years of the initial Taliban takeover.
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