Tuesdays with Morrie is one of two plays being performed in Jerusalem that were written by award-winning playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. (The other is A Picasso, which will be reviewed in next Friday’s In Jerusalem.)
Both plays feature only two actors, a form Hatcher seems to favor. It does create a powerful focus onstage on the character dynamics, though it’s a challenge for the actors to learn so many lines and remain in the spotlight without pause.
Under the direction of Yael Valier, Yehoshua Looks (who portrays Morrie Schwartz) and Simon Stout (portraying Mitch Albom) do a superb job of bringing to the stage the adaptation of Mitch Albom’s bestselling memoir, which tells the true story of his journey with his dying professor.
It is “a tiny book I wrote about our experience that grew beyond anyone’s imagination,” Albom wrote in a 2017 Detroit Free Press article on the occasion of the book’s 20th anniversary. “I’ve added a new and final chapter because I am still, decades later, trying to process what transpired.”
Stout convincingly plays a likable Mitch, a successful sports journalist who is drawn into spending time weekly with his former college professor, who is dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Mitch’s extroverted energy and curiosity are matched by the wit, humor, and vulnerability of Morrie as the two banter their way through a life-changing eight months together.
Doing a great job with a very demanding part
Having seen Looks in several different roles over the past few years, he seemed to me to have found in Morrie the role he was born to play, doing a great job with a very demanding part. As I watched him laugh and cry, his body gradually becoming less mobile and his breathing shorter, he was Morrie. I felt every emotion he expressed, and by the end of the play there were tears in my eyes.
Watching an invalid’s gradual decline toward his final moments may not sound like a first choice for a night out at the theater. But this story is really about living – taking life by the horns and experiencing it to the full.There’s a reason the book has sold over 20 million copies. Yeah, yeah (as the characters like to say), it’s touchy-feely, but Morrie explicitly invites us to embrace “the touching and the feeling” – and if we do, we have much to gain.
THE PLAY opens with Mitch telling us: “The last class of my professor’s life was in his house. The subject was the meaning of life. There was one student.” After a 16-year hiatus, Mitch has reconnected with his Jewish college professor, making a duty call visiting the sick after seeing him on Ted Koppel’s Nightline show. Somehow, the busy young journalist with no time for anything finds himself committing to visit the older man on a weekly basis, until the very end.
Their dialogue is a mix of witty banter, vulnerable sharing, and one-liners that would sound good on a fridge magnet. Morrie says: “I’m dying! You’re dying, too – just a whole lot slower!” He tells his student: “Only when you know how to die do you know how to live.” And he warns Mitch that living unhappily is worse than dying.
Morrie instructs Mitch how to escape from the traps into which we fall: “If you don’t like the culture, make up your own… Age is not a competition. I can be any age I’ve ever been… We’re all running. We’re in the human race!” But he is not some know-it-all guru, declaiming from the pinnacle of enlightenment; he cries uninhibitedly, and he is present with all his flaws and vulnerability.
Morrie’s Jewishness is expressed in his occasional Yiddishisms and his parents’ family history, but it is not a dominant element, at least overtly. He “used to be an agnostic, but now I am not so sure.” Asked about Job, he retorts: “I think God overdid it.” Nonetheless, we can speculate that perhaps being brought up in the Jewish tradition, with its mix of humor and search for meaning, has a lot to do with who Morrie is.
Since I attended a rehearsal, I did not get to experience the full lighting design, but I’m told that there are some exciting lighting effects in the show (handled by John Krug), with over 60 lighting cues. Various musical choices also added to the show.
Morrie’s choice of epitaph, “A teacher to the last,” brought to mind Prof. Nehama Leibowitz’s insistence that her tombstone simply read “Teacher” (mori means “my teacher” in Hebrew, adding another layer of meaning to this Israeli production). I also thought of Nehama when Morrie said that if you live life to the full and make people your priority, then when you die, you live on in the hearts of the people you touched.
While I was writing Nehama Leibowitz’s biography after her death, I sensed this truth very strongly in all the people who had known her: that she lived on in them. Through the play Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie continues to live on in us, giving us a deeper appreciation for life.
I recommend you bring a pen to write down any one-liners that move you or thoughts that arise. Also, tissues for the tears. And if you’d like to spend your Tuesday with Morrie, there are two shows intentionally scheduled on that day.
Natan Rothstein contributed to this review.
