The selling point for Trayf, now making its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is Louisa Jacobson, Meryl Streep's youngest daughter fresh off a sunny television debut on HBO's The Gilded Age.
It's lucky for the production there's a star to draw audiences in, as Lindsay Joelle's script offers rich rewards that transcend any star power (plus, Jacobson is only in one scene anyway).
The play, which takes its title from the Jewish word for something unfit to be eaten/used under religious laws, probes questions of community, belonging, and identity as it challenges the lines between secularism and Orthodox Judaism. Zalmy (a charming Ilan Eskenazi) and Shmuel (a vociferous Ben Hirschorn) are lifelong best friends, but Zalmy has a secret. He's enchanted by secular life — roller-skating and, most particularly, pop music.
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When the two embark on a quest to be "lamplighters" for their faith on the streets of Manhattan, they encounter Jonathan (a haunting Garrett Young), a lost, young man whose grief and recent discovery of unknown family history have left him reeling. In Zalmy and his family, Jonathan finds a lifeline and plunges into the Orthodox faith with a zealousness that underlines his desperation.
Jacobson portrays Jonathan's girlfriend, Leah, a secular Jew, who is bereft at her boyfriend's sudden transformation into a man she doesn't recognize. She's heartbreaking in her single scene, confronting Shmuel about the constraints of their religion.
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On The Gilded Age, she's frankly bland, a rather boring moral beacon amidst the sharpened knives of the conniving society women. But here, she's steadfast and grounded, a woman whose life has been upended but won't go down without a fight.
But it's the three men, boys really, this play revolves around. While Shmuel is dedicated to his Orthodox life to the point of having blinders on, Zalmy hungers for balance, for a life outside the small community they have in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Yet it's Jonathan, so heartbreakingly broken as he's portrayed by Young, who opens their eyes to what they have and what they're missing. Jonathan helps Zalmy understand the friendships and bonds he's been born into, while he teaches Shmuel the limits of his strident faith, the dangers of committing so fully to an idea that one loses sight of everything else.
The production, as directed by Maggie Burrows with an assured hand, is spare — a zippy 80 minutes cast against what is nearly an empty black box theater save a streetlight, some chairs, and a bench. But the questions Trayf raises are bigger than any more hyper-realistic backdrop could provide.
There are no easy answers here, no clear path to charting a course somewhere between freedom and community. None of these men may ever find what they're looking for, but Zalmy and Shmuel at least have something to hold onto while they search — each other. B+
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