Despite trying to avoid his Jewish identity, writer Glen Berger found himself interpreting the tale of the Wandering Jew, he tells Belinda McKeon
'In everything that I've written, people somehow wind up without their pants," says Glen Berger. "It must be a Jewish thing." Or maybe it's an Irish thing, he reconsiders, mentioning the scene in Beckett's Endgame where Nagg tells the story of the tailor who took longer to make a pair of trousers than God took to make the world, but who insisted that his trousers were better made. Berger shrugs. "Then again, that line comes from an old Yiddish joke."
Facing up to his Jewish identity took Berger, a native of Washington but with family roots in Russia and Poland, many years, but in terms of his writing, he says, it turned out to be the best thing he could ever do. It gave him his most successful play, Underneath the Lintel, for one thing; a one-man show that opened off-Broadway in 2001, ran for 15 months and has since received over 60 productions around the world. Next week, it will have its Irish premiere, in the hands of Landmark Productions.
Philip O'Sullivan, who last year appeared in Landmark's production of Edward Albee's The Goat, will play the role of the fanatical librarian who is so outraged by the late return of a book ("a Baedeker's travel guide, in deplorable condition") that he determines to track down the offending borrower. And, given that the library book is over a century overdue, it's no surprise that his quest turns out to be a bizarre one, taking him outside his home in Holland for the first time in his cosseted life and on a long journey in pursuit of a man he comes to suspect of being the mythical Wandering Jew. From a postbox in China to a dry cleaner's in London - where the inevitable lost pair of trousers have languished since 1913 - to a German tram, a New York archive and an Australian attic, his journey is long, sometimes painful and often comical. And when, at the play's end, he waltzes offstage to the sound of a Yiddish song from many years ago, he has learned plenty. But mostly about himself.
Berger's own period of self-discovery, soon after he left college in Philadelphia, was to the tune of similar music. There was a tune, he says, or rather a type of tune, which he could not get out of his head. "I didn't know what it was, but I knew that I'd know it if I heard it," he explains. "So I began to go into all these record stores, spending a whole lot of money that I didn't have, buying old Serbian recordings, or old drinking songs, and nothing was really quite right, and I was on the verge of giving up. Then I gave it one last try, and I found a cassette tape of Dave Tarras, the klezmer clarinettist of the 1920s, and on the way home I listened to it and I knew that this was what I had been looking for."
THAT THE MUSIC he had been craving was rooted in the heritage he had worked to leave behind - klezmer is a tradition of secular Jewish music which began in the 15th century - came, Berger admits, as a shock. "I had long ago rejected Judaism as a religion, but suddenly in that moment, hearing how that music felt instantly familiar, I realised that every thing, every image in my plays was Jewish. A lighthouse keeper in Scotland, reading natural history all day . . . he was actually a Talmudic scholar. And these cobbled streets and crooked chimneys that kept coming into my writing, which I thought were from Mother Goose and from British nursery rhymes, were actually the ghettoes of Poland. And I realised that even if I couldn't do Judaism completely spiritually, I could perhaps approach it from an aesthetic perspective."
For some members of the audience at performances of Underneath the Lintel, however, Berger's perspective on Judaism came across not as aesthetic but as offensive. He received several letters accusing him of anti-Semitism (for several reasons, among them his portrayal of the Wandering Jew as someone unwilling to pay his library fines), and still does to this day, he says; but there were also letters castigating him for being anti-Christian. And for being pro-Zionist.
Asked about them now, Berger looks unbothered. He pretty much expected such correspondence, he says, and has a boilerplate letter he sends out as a response. "It states: one - that this play isn't about Judaism or Christianity. Two - that we can do anything we want and that we can, over time, turn any sort of bias around if we keep making art that does that. And also I bring up the fact, which I didn't know myself before I wrote the play, that a Jewish community in the early 1930s made a film in Yiddish, warning of the growing Nazi menace, and that that film was called The Wandering Jew, and used that figure." He shakes his head. "And they have much better credentials than I have."
CERTAIN PREOCCUPATIONS RUN through Underneath the Lintel, less as explicit themes than as whispers or doubts that nag at the already-troubled psyche of the play. Questions for which there can be no full answers return again and again, in different forms. Against the enormity of the universe, how much can one life matter? Faced with the onward lurch of time, is action somehow pointless or doomed? And how should we deal with the fact that our lives come but once, and that a single event, a single error, can change those lives in ways that we can never undo?
Everything in the librarian's world is imbued with the uneasy consciousness of these realities; every object seems marked with ominous portents. The date stamp with which he conducts his daily tasks at the library becomes, in this mindset, an object of profound and almost unbearable significance; it contains, he realises, the date of his death, and many dates he will never, can never, know. It seems like a deeply pessimistic stance on the world; even the most functional objects become objects of gloom, because they will outlive us in one form or another; they foretell our absence from the world. But there are other ways to look at it, Berger insists.
"The fact is, there will be a date that is a hundred million years from now, just as there was a date one hundred million years ago," he says. "And that is a time that's just as legitimate as now, just as legitimate as one hundred million years ago. Yes, it's terrifying, but that's the beginning of a spiritual life, I think: bewilderment and terror. Because how could it be otherwise? The universe is absolutely, insanely enormous." Doesn't that enormity prove too overwhelming, however, to be expressed in the written word? Yes, he says, but that's really the point.
"It's my dream to practice bewilderment. It feels right when I'm gasping for air at the sheer . . . bewilderingness of it all. But it changes everything, when you think of a scene for a play that somehow pits things of insignificance against the backdrop of infinity. Having that larger perspective makes everything we do very, very funny, and very sad, all at the same time."
Another enormity which boggles Berger is that of language, of the etymology of words, the study of which can transform seemingly mundane words into storehouses of historical and literary richness, into vivid metaphors which sweep millennia into themselves. The play is full of such discoveries, how a single utterance can uproot a buried past of meaning, but Berger himself had a thrilling experience of etymology a couple of months after the first New York run had started.
"I was looking through an encyclopedia of philosophy, which isn't something I do a lot, and I came across the word 'sublime', I think for something else I was working on," he says. "And it explained how 'sublime' referred to transcendent vastness, vastness that baffled us or left us in awe, and then it gave the etymology of the word."
Sublime, the book explained, came from the words "sub", for "under", and from "limen", which originally derived from "lintel". There, in black and white, was the title of the play in which he had grappled most thoroughly with the nature of the sublime. You couldn't make it up. Still, he just had.
Landmark's production of Underneath the Lintel is at Project Cube from Tue until Sat, Sept 23, at 6.15pm, as part of the Magnet Entertainment Dublin Fringe Festival. Booking: 01-8819613 or www.fringefest.com. The play will then run at the Helix, DCU, from Oct 3 to 7, at 8pm. Booking: 01-7007000 or www.thehelix.ie