“Twelve Minor Prophets” might sound like a Hebrew School pageant, since it’s an educational and playful stage adaptation based on the last twelve books of the Old Testament. But the playfulness is sophisticated: Each book is dramatized differently, as a musical, or a Western, or a puppet show. And the Biblical stories are given a contemporary frame involving a group of friends and family arguing over theology and politics while grappling with grief.
It’s a busy, witty, erudite, ambitious work of theater that doesn’t completely hold together; it tries to do too much at once. But it’s a great calling card for a scrappy, inventive Brooklyn-based theater company, the Eno River Players, founded 11 years ago in North Carolina by Leo Egger, then 14 years old, seeded by his Bar Mitzvah money.
At the start, Abby (Liat Graf) greets her friends (the audience) in the basement of a Jewish community center (JILL@JACK), thanking us for being there for her brother Jesse, who has spent the past year putting together some Biblical skits that he and several friends are going to share tonight. “They’re a bit misguided,” she confides to us, “but what’s important is that we show him we care.” We eventually learn that this is the anniversary of the death of Jesse and Abby’s father, a Biblical scholar; that Jesse was never religious but has taken the death hard. He has had a recurring nightmare that he interpreted as a command that he try to finish his father’s work, and that he’s decided to do so with this show.
Jesse (Jake Fallon), takes over, and the cast quickly works through the Seven Days of Creation using pantomime and shadow puppetry.
Jesse then pauses for Abby, who is a religion scholar like their father, to give a lecture (complete with blackboard) on what’s called the Book of Twelve (Trei Asar) in the Jewish Bible (Tanakh), but referred to in the Christian Bible as Twelve Minor Prophets, not because the prophets are minor, but because the books are relatively brief. She cites some passages that are familiar to a lay audience – “’Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” from Amos, a favorite of Martin Luther King, Jr.” then says pointedly: “For us right now, it may be difficult to hear the prophets’ violent condemnations, or their claimed special relationship to the Promised Land, without thinking of contemporary Israel-Palestine. But it’s important to remember that their words are historical products, not eternal truths. The safest way to read them is to understand their original audience—a people two and a half thousand years ago making sense of unspeakable tragedy.”
The skits that follow, each with its own colorfully painted backdrop, are a mixed bag in their cleverness and clarity. Only a handful of these Biblical books revolve around a discernible plot to begin with, making them easier to stage. The most famous of these is Jonah, and that is among my favorite scenes, done as a musical, with Chana Reese as a tap-dancing whale singing (with Jonah in its sights) “Gotta pray, for more prey, Lord show me the way, don’t let him get away!”
The Book of Haggai, a prophet who urged the building of the Second Temple, is adapted as a podcast, which is spot-on,
The adaptations of some of the more obscure books probably require advanced knowledge to fully appreciate, but most have at least a few funny lines. Amos is done as a teen drama, with the high priest/ school principal Amaziah (Reese again) calling Amos (Anna Aubry) into his office. “Your ivory palaces shall be demolished,” Amos thunders.
“Look,” Amaziah says, “I don’t want to do this. But if you keep that kind of language up, I’m going to have to transfer you back to Judah. You can’t prophesy here”
I suppose I need a spoiler alert here to tell you that they don’t get to do full scenes for all twelve prophets. Jesse’s show is interrupted by a couple of late-arriving characters, one comic, one quasi-cosmic, and some heart-felt confrontations; the most striking of these include the mutual recriminations between Abby and Jesse, mourning in different ways; and between Jesse and Paul (Felix Teich) over the meaning of the prophets:
Jesse: They’re about loss and sin and mercy and redemption.
Paul: You’re lying. They’re about cruelty. They’re about violence. They’re about the land of Israel.: Then he brings up Gaza (both Ancient and modern.)
It’s all too much territory to get through, in only ninety minutes. But I’m glad they were able at least to mention all twelve prophets, and assign most of them modern-day genres, even if only for a handful of lines. Such as late-night comedy for the prophet Micah: “You could have chosen any false idol in the world and you chose a calf?!”
Twelve Minor Prophets
Eno River Players at JILL@JACK through February 28
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $30 to $100
Written by Charlie Mayhew and Leo Egger
Directed by Leo Egger
Production design by Madeleine Rubin-Charlesworth
Music direction, piano and sound design by Jake Eisner
Composer Charlie Mayhew
Cast: Anna Aubry, Jake Fallon, Liat Graf, Yehuda L. Hyman, Brian Linden, Chani Reese, and Felix Teich
