A small group of actors assembled around tables earlier this month at the American Conservatory Theater’s rehearsal hall for a full table read of “Higher,” ACT artistic director Carey Perloff’s new play set in Israel and New York.
In preparation for the Feb. 1 world premiere in San Francisco, Perloff wanted the actors to understand her intentions for each character, and how Jewish identity is manifested in the characters’ relationships to each other and to themselves.
It also was particularly important to her that the actors and director Mark Rucker understood her own relationship to Judaism.
“I didn’t write it to be a ‘Jewish play.’ But you write from your own experience, your own unconscious, and things just come out,” Perloff said in an interview.
“Obviously, a lot of these preoccupations are things I grew up with in a secular Jewish family, but a very conscious Jewish family in which culture was the religion and education was the religion. My mother is a Viennese refugee. There are many things that are very much part of my life in this play.”
Perloff worked on “Higher” for the past few years, staging readings most recently at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. She used the readings to gauge audience response, make revisions and flesh out the characters. The museum space known as the “yud” provided an ideal setting for a play about architecture, memorials and Jewish identity.
“I love putting something up to an audience, what story grabs them, what feels opaque to them, what makes them laugh and who they are drawn to. … What has been so interesting is how eager Jewish audiences have been to wrestle with it. Other people can experience it. There are a lot of ways into this play … but non-Jews will experience it in a different way.”
“Higher” is about competition, lost children, grief and a yearning for connection. Two architects in love, Elena and Michael (played by René Augesen and Andrew Polk), enter the same competition, unbeknownst to each other, to create a memorial in Israel that has been commissioned by a terror victim’s wealthy New York widow (played by Concetta Tomei).
Alexander Crowther and Ben Kahre, young ACT master’s students, play bereft sons Jacob and Isaac. Jacob’s father, the minister of agriculture, was another victim of the terrorist attack. Isaac, a gay chef whose right hand has been burned in an accident, is the son of Michael, a world-renowned Jewish architect whose most Jewish experience probably is shopping at the classic N.Y. grocer Zabar’s. Michael builds endless memorials, but he knows little of either grief or faith, or of his son’s emerging Jewish orthodoxy.
“Part of Isaac’s desperate attempt to find family, not having ever felt that he had it at home, was to discover his relationship to his Judaism, which Michael thinks is just a way of attacking him,” Perloff said. In the midst of creating a shared memorial, each of her characters has to confront personal grief and memory.
Perloff said several visits to Israel had a profound effect on her sense of place and history. The first was in the 1980s after she finished a Fulbright scholarship at Oxford. The trip “knocked me sideways,” she said. Later, as a winner of the Koret Israel Prize, she traveled again to the Jewish state to meet with colleagues in the arts.
Another reason she chose Israel as the setting was the juxtaposition of an ancient land and a modern monument.
“That part of the world for us Americans, the ancient pull of history, is enormous,” said Perloff, a Stanford graduate who studied classics and archaeology.
“‘Higher’ was born in part out of my fascination with architects, and with the kind of obsession it can take to imagine and create a signature building,” she said. She mused about the different ways architects can trigger and assuage painful memories, like Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, which pulls the viewer into the earth, in contrast to monuments that soar skyward. Even small, individual memorials can evoke sharp, painful feelings and keep you from forgetting, she said, “like a shard of glass or a mangled right hand.”
“Higher” runs Feb. 1-19 at the Children’s Creativity Museum theater, 221 Fourth St., S.F. $45-$65. www.act-sf.org.