Odd couple offers good laughs in Winnipeg Jewish Theatre romcom After Jerusalem
WJT announces expanded season for 2019-20, including premiere of Manitoba play
Romantic comedies aren't rare — but the pool of plays about Saskatchewan schoolteachers falling for Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem is considerably smaller.
And though it doesn't entirely reinvent the wheel, Vancouver-based (and Winnipeg-born) playwright Aaron Bushkowsky's 2011 play After Jerusalem, which closes Winnipeg Jewish Theatre's season, gets credit for a fresh and entertaining spin on the romcom genre.
Our unlikely couple are Carol (Sharon Bajer), a middle-aged, Labradoodle-owning, Honda Accord-driving guidance councillor from Regina. On a solo trip to Jerusalem for Christmas, she meets Vlad (Toby Hughes).
He's an Israeli soldier (via Russia) in his mid-30s who detests his job, the tourists who pour through the checkpoint he guards and most things in life — with the exception of Russian writer Anton Chekhov and American movies.
Which explains, in part, why he falls so hard for Carol when a spiral of small fibs has him convinced she's a famous movie star who can help get the script he's written into the hands of Canadian-born movie star Ryan Reynolds.
Sparks fly for normally buttoned-down Carol, who's never had vacation fling (except for that one time in Brandon) and Vlad, who's nursing a bad breakup and is intrigued by the woman he thinks is a movie star — although their differences in age, geography, culture and outlook on life seem insurmountable.
They seem an odd pair indeed, but Bushkowsky's snappy script makes their pairing more plausible than in some romcoms. His dialogue is sharp and funny, and his characters well realized.
They're performed marvelously by Bajer and Hughes, whose performances are never overstated and show a crisp comic timing. They have a believable and comedically effective chemistry together in director Ari Weignberg's sprightly production.
They struggle a bit with some elements of Bushkowsky's script, though — notably a couple of film-inspired fantasy sequences that feel out of place and don't quite flow smoothly here.
Bushkowsky also takes some turns for the dramatic in his script, which could be jarring in a romantic comedy, but which I'd argue are true to the setting of the play — a part of the world that is, sadly, not unfamiliar with tragedy. Those turns are handled deftly in Weinberg's production.
I won't spoil what comes for Carol and Vlad "after Jerusalem," but will say Bushkowsky's script moves to a satisfying ending. And at a snappy 65 minutes, it doesn't belabour its point.
It's no Casablanca, but After Jerusalem is satisfying romantic comedy.
WJT's expanded new season focuses on new work
Winnipeg Jewish Theatre also recently announced its 2019-20 season — notable for the fact that it will expand to four shows from three, and will focus on recent Canadian plays, including the premiere of a brand new play from a Winnipeg writer.
The season kicks off with Vancouver writer Mark Leiren-Young's 2018 play Bar Mitzvah Boy (Sept. 14-22), about a lawyer in his 60s (played by Nicholas Rice, who previously dazzled at WJT in Angels In America) who decides it's time for him to have a bar mitzvah.
The season continues with an adaptation of a graphic novel — using puppets. Marcus Jamin adapts James Sturm's graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing, about the struggles of a Jewish baseball team in the 1920s. The co-production with Toronto's Outside the March comes to WJT Nov. 16-24.
In the new year, Toronto's Two Birds Theatre brings Two Birds, One Stone to WJT (Feb. 8-16, 2020). The semi-autobiographical play by Natasha Greenblatt and Rimah Jabr explores the friendship between the Jewish-Canadian and Muslim-Palestinian women.
The Exhibitionists | Two Birds, One Stone:
And the season closes with the premiere of Narrow Bridge (March 28-April 5, 2020) by Winnipeg writer Daniel Thau-Eleff. It follows the story of Sam, who comes out as transgender and then as an Orthodox Jew.
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