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‘Hard Love’ @ Jewish Theatre
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B+
Hannah is forbidden by Jewish law to look at the man she has invited into her ultra-Orthodox home in Jerusalem. But she is in love with him, and worn down by life, and she will soon be torn apart by the push and pull of devotion and desire.
Such is the premise of Israeli playwright Motti Lerner’s “Hard Love,” which is getting an intensely acted production at Jewish Theatre of the South. Starring Mira Hirsch as the desperate, forlorn Hannah and Chris Kayser as her cynical ex-husband, Zvi, the play is both a haunting tale of unrequited love — and an intimate portrait of the vast divide between Israel’s religious and secular worlds.
Slowly releasing information about the lovers’ past and present lives, Lerner uses the arcana of rabbinical law as a device for unhatching the newly rekindled affair between Zvi and Hannah. After 20 years, the two are brought together when their own teenage children become romantically involved and Hannah’s elderly husband is on his deathbed.
Somewhere along the way, Zvi has lost his faith, while Hannah has become wholly immersed in hers. He is a worldly, womanizing novelist who lives in Tel Aviv. She is the sheltered, shabbily dressed wife of the leader of yeshiva. “You have become as evil as the world we live in,” Hannah tells Zvi, as he systematically seduces her.
As the ghosts of dead children and suicidal mothers hover, the two embark on the sort of ill-fated, cosmically misguided rendezvous that might have been designed by Iris Murdoch or any of the great 19th-century novelists.
In a show that is virtually devoid of comedy, director Susan Reid wrings superb performances from her company of two. Kayser’s Zvi is a tightly wound ball of neuroses, Hirsch’s Hannah a vessel of sadness, despair and longing. (Notice how she buries her face in the coat Zvi leaves behind.)
Lerner is writing about a specific religious milieu, but his concerns are universal: the gnawing doubts, smoldering passions and hurtful games of deception and betrayal that ripple through the human condition. At the end of this journey, we wonder just who is manipulating whom.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. 3 p.m. Sundays. Through Feb. 24. $18-$30. Jewish Theatre of the South, Marcus Jewish Community Center, 5342 Tilly Mill Road, Dunwoody. 770-395-2654, jplay.org
BOTTOM LINE: Israeli playwright delivers a shattering meditation on love and faith.
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