Lantern Theater's "New Jerusalem' (1st review)

The power of the courtroom drama has been recognized since Plato depicted Socrates in the dock in the Apology. Shakespeare gave the genre its best punch line: Shylock's "Do I not bleed?" in The Merchant of Venice. More recent examples include The Crucible and Inherit the Wind.

Of course, TV couldn't last five minutes without a courtroom— and, returning the compliment, the modern American courtroom has been increasingly theatricalized: Witness Johnie Cochran's memorable rhyming couplet in the O. J. Simpson trial ("If it doesn't fit,/ You must acquit") or the current trial of Michael Jackson's physician, Conrad Murray. People attend hot-ticket trials the way they flock to Broadway shows. Sometimes they come to blows over seats.

The most fascinating trials involve not the guilt of actions but of ideas. There's no hero like a heretic. So it was with Socrates and Jesus, and so it is with Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) in the Lantern Theater's absorbing production of David Ives's New Jerusalem.

Crimes of greed and passion we can deal with, since they lie within the human norm. But the crime of a new idea is absolutely terrifying. Not even an invading army poses such a threat to the community as unfettered human thought.

Fierce rationality

Spinoza's idea— that matter and spirit are one, and that God is consequently all things— wasn't new; it harks back to the Roman poet Lucretius and his Greek precursors, and takes the name of panentheism. What Spinoza did was to pursue the idea with a fierce rationality, deriving from it both a formal ethics and a political theory based on the supreme value of freedom.

He was still caught in the first flush of his vision when his views came to the attention of Dutch authorities in Amsterdam, where he lived, and to the Jewish community to which he belonged. Both parties were horrified.

Spinoza was still a young man in his 20s, but his precocious brilliance had been to some extent the pride of the Jewish community, and in Ives's portrayal he has a close, almost filial relationship with its chief rabbi, Saul Levi Mortera. This relationship provides the core of the drama.

Three-cornered tragedy

Mortera is compelled by the civic authorities to entrap Baruch into an interrogation that becomes, in effect, an improvised heresy trial before the general congregation. Mortera is deeply offended by being placed in this position, especially with regard to a favored and much-loved pupil, but failure to comply will, as he is firmly told, place the entire community at risk. A three-cornered tragedy is thereby set in motion.

Mortera must chose between betraying Spinoza or endangering his community— a choice that, given his position, he can't make. So the community must reluctantly judge one of its own.

Only Spinoza faces no genuine conflict: His ideas are so self-evident to him that he can't even conceive of concealing them, let alone denying or recanting them. Among those ideas— rigorously derived, of course, from first principles— is that all of us are bound by iron necessity in all we do, and that this necessity is at the same time our perfect freedom. In effect Spinoza is a modern Socrates who can't stop trying to educate his judges, even when his own fate is at stake.

Seduced by integrity

The first act shows Mortera being forced to ensnare Baruch by the officious Dutch representative, Abraham van Valkenburgh, who insists that he is trying to protect the Jews against the wrath of higher authorities, while Spinoza, all unawares, discusses philosophy with his goyische girl friend Clara and his best friend Simon.

Clara, a girl of simple faith played by Mary Tuomanen, is terrified by Spinoza's ideas but overwhelmed by his intellectual force. Simon, too, appears Spinoza's grudging disciple, hardly able to comprehend his friend's arguments but swept away by that rarest and most seductive of human qualities: absolute integrity.

The act ends with Spinoza, lured into the synagogue, suddenly finding himself under close interrogation. From that point on, the play unfolds entirely in "court."

No situation can be more existentially threatening than to be set upon in one's ultimate sanctuary— as every Jew, Spinoza included, would have regarded the synagogue— by one's friends, family and beloved teacher, and suddenly confronted not merely with censure or punishment but excommunication.

Boy forced into manhood

In the role of Spinoza, Sam Henderson skillfully negotiates the transition from trusting innocence to the dawning realization of his peril. His impressive performance contains an occasionally off-putting note of Owen Wilsonish naiveté, but when his Spinoza settles in to fight for his life he is tenacious and unyielding, a boy forced to turn into a man in the course of a single day, and with everything in his life at stake.

Nor do things improve when Clara and Simon appear to testify against him. Even Spinoza's shrewish sister Rebekah (in a fine comic turn by Kittson O'Neill) gets into the act, unleashing a sibling rage that offends the dignity of the proceedings but aptly reveals the underlying hysteria of persecution.

Holding his ground, Spinoza shows himself a master of Talmudic sophistry while yielding not an inch of his own convictions. When, pressed to declare them, he horrifies the congregation in the person of its lay elder (David Blatt), he accepts his inevitable fate.

The emotional as well as dramatic climax of the play comes as Mortera, alternately begging and reviling Spinoza (at one point he even suspects him of demonic possession), must finally pronounce the sentence of excommunication. The true tragedy in the play is his. Mortera's own religious doubts are brought to the surface by Spinoza, whose power of mind, as Mortera is forced to concede, reduces the rabbi's wisdom to naught.

Troubled sleep

When Mortera cries out that he will never again know an untroubled sleep, we realize that the punishment that awaits him is far greater than any he can inflict on Spinoza. It is fully credible that he should see the Devil himself in Spinoza, for who else could be the author of his torment?

David Bardeen rises splendidly to the challenges of this demanding role and the terrible human conflict it embodies, and Ives's script, though overlong, does ample justice to the issues and emotions it evokes.

The script contains a couple of slips. Spinoza refers to the certainty of gravitational laws, although Newton wouldn't pronounce them until some 30 years later. Also, the scales slip unconvincingly in Spinoza's favor when Clara declares him a saint and Simon and Rebekah ask to accompany him into exile. The play should end with the solemnity of Spinoza's isolation, and certainly no tricks are needed to enlist our sympathy with his plight.

Judeo-Christian issue

The entire cast is able, and Charles McMahon's direction keeps the action— much of it in Spinoza's own head— focused and unflagging. Altogether, this is a first-rate production of a literate and often eloquent play that addresses first-order political and philosophical questions and poses them ultimately in terms of what, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, may be the most humanly consequential issue of all: the relation of fathers and sons.

The "New Jerusalem" that William Blake called for was a world imagined afresh. Spinoza's thought certainly achieved that vision.

After his excommunication, Spinoza eked out a living in Amsterdam as a lens grinder until his death in 1677 at the age of 44, keeping company with his thoughts as well as correspondence with some of the most distinguished men of his time. One of them, the great Leibniz, though initially sympathetic, would finally pronounce his work "monstrous." It may be that both Leibniz and Clara were right. Baruch de Spinoza was a saint and a monster at the same time: perhaps the saintliest monster of all.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Marshall A. Ledger, click here.
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To read a related comment by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read a related commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a related commentary by Steve Cohen, click here.