No end in sight: Rabbi’s plays let you decide the finish

Playwright Anton Chekhov once cleverly noted that if a gun is brandished in the first act of a play, it will be fired by the third.

Rabbi Milton Matz is familiar with Chekhov’s homily, but it hardly applies to him. Matz writes plays without ends.

The 80-year-old retired Reform rabbi, psychologist and Rossmoor resident is the author of “Nine Plays in Search of an Ending,” a book of plays. But his work is hardly some avant garde statement on the theatrical establishment.

Matz would just rather let the reader fill in the blanks. He provides a number of complex scenarios regarding intermarriage, race relations, death and other heavy topics and lets you decide how things will turn out. 

“Audiences will be asked to put themselves in the shoes of each character and see how they think about how to deal with things. And what this does is increase our knowledge not only about ourselves, but about other people,” he said.

“The process of learning how to deal with other people is called social intelligence. And it is frequently more important than intellectual intelligence in enabling people to be successful. So one of the major goals is to increase people’s social and moral intelligence.”

Here’s one of his scenarios: Two men headed to a conference in Chicago meet on a plane. One is a Jew who lost his entire family at the hands of the German army as it overran Ukraine. The other is a German who recently discovered his father commanded the Wermacht in — naturally — the Ukraine campaign.

“So what is going to happen? Will they meet again? And if so, what will occur?” asked the rabbi.

“It all depends on the nature of the audience. If there are survivors in that audience, they are very likely to react in a totally different way than the children of survivors or non-survivors. And if they’re Jews, they’ll react differently than non-Jews.”

Three of Matz’s nine endless plays actually do end. One relives the last days before the Dutch Jewish establishment excommunicated Baruch Spinoza in 1656. Another, “Affairs of State,” deals with a psychiatrist counseling a prospective First Lady on the supposed infidelity of her presidential candidate husband. (When asked if this play is based on the Clintons, Matz answers, “Hell no.”)

Finally, “Breakfast at the Regency” is based on the death of Matz’s first wife five years ago. When she was diagnosed with cancer, they moved from Cleveland to the Bay Area to be closer to their son. It turned out Anne Matz’s cancer was more serious than they anticipated, so the couple quickly had to decide where she would spend her last days. They chose a hotel.

“She was a survivor, and her family came out of Germany in 1941. Their first sense of security was when they came to a hotel in Spain,” said Matz. “That hotel turned out to give her a sense of being at home.”

With life experiences like that, writing plays has always come naturally to Matz. Plus, “as a psychologist, you’re always doing improv,” he said. It also has helped him in coming up with realistic dialogue.

He knows how to end plays, too — it’s just that sometimes he chooses not to.

“The purpose of my book is not to provide answers but provoke discussions and enable people to develop conflict-resolution skills.”

And with all those newly developed skills, maybe that gun won’t be going off in the third act — or even at all.




“Nine Plays in Search of an Ending” by Rabbi Milton Matz (iUniverse, 302 pages, $21.95)