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About
PAT LAUNER
13150 Portofino Drive
Del Mar CA 92014
FOR: THE SAN DIEGO JEWISH JOURNAL
JANUARY 2014
Literature shaped his life – as a Jew and as a playwright.
Aaron Posner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, where there wasn’t a large Jewish community. He had his bar mitzvah at the only local temple, but as a third generation American (his great-grandparents were from Russia/Ukraine) in a not-so-Jewish environment, his upbringing was “culturally Jewish” but fairly secular.
Then he saw the film of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“I was only about 7,” says Posner, who currently lives in Maryland. “But that was my first really strong and formative experience of identifying in a meaningful way as Jewish.”
He saw the movie several more times and then, a few years later, he made a brief appearance in the stage show (“I don’t really sing”).
His “strongest Jewish connections,” Posner says, “have always come through literature. From the stories of Chelm to the works of Chaim Potok , from Bernard Malamud to Philip Roth, to all of Isaac Bashevis Singer. My life as a Jew is in literature.”
And his dramatic adaptations are, too. But more on that in a minute.
It was Jewishness that brought Posner’s parents together. They were 16, and both were active in BBYO, the B’nai Brith Youth Organization, the largest and oldest Jewish youth organization in the world (90 years and counting).
His father, who hailed from Seattle, was President of the West Coast Boys (part of Aleph Zadik Aleph ) , and his mother, a Canadian who grew up in Vancouver, was national president of West Coast Girls.
“They were set up on a date at a convention – and they’ve been married for over 50 years.”
Posner, now in his 40s, got a later (but more theatrical) matrimonial start. Five years ago, married actress Erin Weaver, whom he met during a production of “Into the Woods” at the Arden Theatre in Philadelphia, which he co-founded and served as artistic director. They have a precocious, “amazing” 2 year-old named Maisie .
The Literature Connection
Posner came from “a big family of readers.” His father was a professor at the University of Oregon. His mother was an independent producer of videos and documentaries, and at one time, host of “Good Morning, Oregon.”
“I was exposed to a huge range of literature,” Posner reports. “It was reading and storytelling that got me into theater.”
Starting from about age 8, he was taken to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and that experience stayed with him. Shakespeare remains a favorite; he’s directed many of the plays.
All his writing has been literary adaptations: from Mark Twain (a musical version of “A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage”), to Ken Kesey “(Sometimes a Great Notion”), to David Foster Wallace (“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”), to Anton Chekhov (“Stupid F***king Bird,” adapted from “The Seagull,” and “Life Sucks, or The Present Ridiculous,” adapted from “Uncle Vanya ”).
San Diegans have seen – and loved – two of his most Jewish adaptations: Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” and “My Name is Asher Lev,” which had successful runs at North Coast Repertory Theatre in 2004 and 2009, respectively.
“The Chosen” earned him a Barrymore Award at the Arden Theatre, and it won the 2013 Outer Critics Circle Award in New York. Here at home, I honored David Ellenstein’s direction with a Patté Award for Theatre Excellence.
Now we’re about to see the San Diego premiere of a play inspired by Posner’s “first favorite author,” Kurt Vonnegut, widely acclaimed as one of the premier American novelists of the 20th century. The title, “Who Am I This Time? (And Other Conundrums of Love),” comes from one of three early Vonnegut short stories Posner conflated.
The Vonnegut story, “Who Am I This Time?” first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961. The other two were published in the Ladies Home Journal: “The Long Walk to Forever” in 1960 and “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” in 1962. All three were part of Vonnegut’s much-praised story collection, “Welcome to the Monkey House” (published in 1968).
[Interesting side note: In 1991, a short-lived television series called “Kurt Vonnegut’s Monkey House” aired on Showtime . It was based on Vonnegut’s stories and hosted by Vonnegut himself].
“I love Vonnegut’s work,” Posner says. “It’s all about the sweet and sour nature of the world. Early on, he was hopeful and ironic. Definitely reaching for something positive. By the end of his life, he’d lost the humor and became angry, depressed and cynical.
[Vonnegut’s past may justify his cynicism. In 1944, his mother committed suicide – on Mother’s Day – while he was home on leave from the Army. By the next year, he was a prisoner of war (captured after the Battle of the Bulge). He survived the horrific firebombing of Dresden in an underground meat-locker – called Slaughterhouse #5 – that the Germans used as a detention center. The POWs were made to gather bodies for mass burial. Since there were too many to bury, the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. “All these civilians’ remains,” he later wrote, “were burned to ashes”].
But “at the moment when he began writing,” Posner asserts, “he had as clear an eye as I could possibly imagine. He saw the world in a way that helped me see the world, through my own perspective.”
A Sweet Story of Love
Posner started working with these stories 25 years ago, just after he graduated from Northwestern University, but he’s refined the piece over time. The subject of his play, as we’re told at the outset by the affable, folksy stage manager/narrator and sometime character is “love. Pure and complicated.”
“As a night in the theater, it’s easy to love,” said The Oregonian, after the Artists Repertory Theatre production opened in 2012. According to Portlandstagereviews.com, it’s “a delightful, lyrical piece of love and simpler times – with more than a few belly laughs of a more homespun Vonnegut quality. Audiences will find themselves enchanted.”
“The adaptation is very true to the original stories,” says Posner, “involving the audience in a shared act of storytelling.”
The action takes place in the small mythical town of North Crawford, Connecticut, 1962, on the cusp of the cataclysmic changes that would overtake our country, including war, assassinations and the Beatles. What you might call a simpler time in optimistic, pre-ironic America.
The North Crawford Mask and Wig Club, “the finest community theater in central Connecticut,” is where we meet our guide, Tom, who tells us that the company is putting on a show for us. “We’re on a theater stage here, so anything we do is automatically suspect – fishy, even.”
Still, Tom insists, “the stories you’re going to hear are true – whether any of them happened or not.”
This is the conceit Posner conceived “to make the evening mount up to more than the sum of its pieces. The stories spoke to each other in interesting ways.”
Last month, the play was mounted at the Oregon Contemporary Theatre and now, at Indiana Repertory Theatre, as well as North Coast Repertory Theatre (1/8-2/2).
“Knowing the kind of work [North Coast Rep artistic director] David Ellenstein does, and how wonderfully he’s handled my other work, I sent him the script.”
Ellenstein won’t be directing this time (the guest director is Andrew Barnicle ), but he liked the script because it was “charming, funny and sincere. And it was very well received in Oregon – by critics and audiences alike.”
“The line between heartfelt and sentimental is always tricky,” Posner admits. “This is a bit of a valentine. What I love – in literature and theater – is things that tell the truth about how somebody is looking at the world. When it’s very truthful, from the heart, people can see that. Here, even in a very positive, optimistic look at simpler times, there are still struggles.
In “A Long Walk to Forever,” a soldier goes AWOL to thwart the impending marriage of his life-long (undeclared) love. In “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son,” a husband/father leaves behind his dazzling but demanding new wife, a Hollywood diva, to return to his family. And in “Who Am I This Time?,” a nebbishy store clerk finds his heart, passion and soulmate onstage, completely transforming himself into whatever character is called for (hence, the title). The piece underscores the illusionary line between life, love and theater.
These flawed, very human characters take what you might call a long walk to humanity, redemption and love.
Posner remains busy, collaborating with his wife on a children’s piece set to open at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. And he’s co-directing “The Tempest” with Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, with music by Tom Waits and movement by Pilobolus Dance (opening April 1 at the Smith Center in Las Vegas and then at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston).
He retains warm feelings for “Who Am I This Time?”
“I love this piece. I’m very proud of it, and I hope it has a long, rich life. I love to watch people laugh, and reach over for the hand of their partner during the show. It puts a positive energy in the world in a way I find very lovely. It makes us feel more connected in the good struggle together.”
“Who Am I This Time? (And Other Conundrums of Love)” runs at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, January 8-February2.
Performances are xxx.
Tickets are $xx.
Info and Tickets at (858) 481-1055 , www.northcoastrep.org
©2014 PAT LAUNER
