Her Name is Naama Potok
SYDNEY audiences are set to be moved, with the Australian stage version of Chaim Potok’s gripping coming-of-age novel 'My Name is Asher Lev', which officially opened this week, at the Eternity Playhouse in Darlinghurst.
SYDNEY audiences are set to be moved, with the Australian stage version of Chaim Potok’s gripping coming-of-age novel My Name is Asher Lev, which officially opened this week, at the Eternity Playhouse in Darlinghurst.
Presented by the Shalom Institute and Moira Blumenthal Productions, the play – starring John O’Hare, Annie Byron and Tim McGarry – explores a New York Chassidic family’s conflict between tradition and individualism through Asher, a boy whose immense talent and passion for painting is frowned upon by his father, Aryeh, who regards art as a sacrilege.
Among the audience will be the late rabbi, artist and author’s daughter, Naama Potok – a creative spirit and successful actress who recalls feeling deeply moved upon first reading the book as a teenager.
Potok told The AJN on Monday: “I simply understood the soul of the main character and realised there was something very profound there, even though I wouldn’t fully comprehend it until later.”
That feeling only grew since the book was adapted into a play by Aaron Posner in 2008, with Potok starring as Asher’s mother, Rivkeh, in three productions in the US.
Potok said writing the book gave her father “a way to explore his own creativity and grasp what it was to pursue something that was his lifeline, even though it was something that was neither embraced nor encouraged by the people who loved him dearly”.
“Like every novel, it is a work of fiction, but the aim was always to write something that reaches another person and really connects.”
The play won an Outer Critics Circle Award and the prestigious John Gassner Award and is described by the Associated Press as “compellingly personal, yet universal”.
Potok believes it holds its relevance today partly due to “its ability to connect us across gender, religion and race”.
“It’s about a number of themes, one being we become individuals as we grow older that are not always what our parents thought we’d become.
“There are customs and traditions that are taught to us with the best of intentions, but we take the truth from what we know from our own lives.”
Potok said the play translates in unique ways each time it’s taken to the stage. She hopes Sydney audiences “take from it something that provides either a questioning of, or an understanding or insight about, what’s at the very heart of conflicts that exist in our lives, either internally or externally”.
My Name is Asher Lev is showing until May 29 at the Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst. For more information or to book tickets, visit www.encounters.edu.au or phone (02) 9381 4000.
SHANE DESIATNIK
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