Photo of Lise Bruneau and Alexander Strain by Matt Urban, Delaware Theatre Company
When Aaron Posner first gave me a copy of the script he adapted from Chaim Potok’s novel I immediately saw my life unfold as Asher Lev navigated the waters of his passion for his art and his relationship to family. My grandfather was a Baptist minister who spoke to me often about the importance of devoting oneself to God and to family by placing both at the very center of life and love. As I grew older, he began to reveal his desire for me to pursue ministry, seeing in me the power to lead, with a faithful heart, those I came into contact with. When I was 18 years old, he had a heart attack, and over the course of the next three months, he slowly passed away. But in those three months my chosen path became clear to me, and it was not ministry, it was theatre. At first, when I told him I was going to college to study directing, his disappointment was palpable. But as those three short months came to a close, he began to understand that the art I had chosen to commit my life to was, in its own way, my personal ministry.
What has become difficult for my parents, and certainly would have been difficult for my grandfather were he still alive, is that for much of my career, the stories I have chosen to tell as a director have not been, as Asher Lev puts it, “pretty pictures of birds or flowers.” They have been frustrated explorations of my life and the world that shaped me. As my professional career began, the student who once kept all his thoughts in his head began to rail against the things in his personal life he did not understand. The things in his world that were causing so much personal divisiveness: homophobia, racism, alcoholism and especially religion.
So how do I explain to my family why I am drawn to the plays I choose to direct? They refuse to see most of them. If I had the chance, what would I say to my grandfather to help him understand why the boy of quiet faith he loved so much has chosen to tell stories that cause my family so much pain? When Asher attempts to explain this to his father, I hear all the things I think I would say, and my heart aches as the words that come from Asher’s mouth are not enough to bridge the divide between them. I believe now that the only bridge is in the work itself and how it triggers conversation, contempt, or revelation in each person who views it, including me. If were I to hang my own internal conflict on the crossbars of family and love, it would reveal the journey of a boy who has been traveling to the far corners of the world to understand why I do what I do only to learn that the reason for every story I tell is how it is shaping the man I am becoming when I am at home.
Jeremy Skidmore
Director, My Name is Asher Lev
