'Nathan the Wise' at People's Light (2nd review)

Nathan the Wise, staged impressively at Peoples Light, is an important work but an imperfect play.

For starters, Nathan the Wise can't decide if it's serious drama or a comedy of mistaken identities. It's long on explication but short on character development. It's filled with demonstrations of friendship that seem applied from without by the playwright.

Nathan the Wise, written in 1779 by Gotthold Lessing, is a plea for religious tolerance in the best spirit of the Enlightenment (Lessing even argues for universal brotherhood). He was called a "Spinozist," i.e., a rationalist, which was then as bad as being an atheist. Small wonder that performances of Nathan the Wise were banned during Lessing's lifetime.

Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, the play concerns the manner in which the sultan Saladin, a Jew and a Knight Templar bridge the gaps between Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

How plausible was inter-religious friendship in the Jerusalem of that time?

Saladin the peaceful?

When Saladin defeated the Third Crusade in 1192, he and his army executed thousands of Christians. Saladin personally chopped off the head of at least one. His Muslim biographer wrote that Saladin was committed to jihad against unbelievers. Both Jews and Christians feared him, but the Saladin we see in Nathan the Wise is an unrealistically peaceful man.

Most Jews who remained in Jerusalem did so because they were too poor to emigrate, and they were religiously devout. But Nathan is never shown praying, not even touching the mezuzzah on the doorpost of his home. He speaks of a desire to move to the banks of the Ganges, as does his friend who is an observant Muslim. Not plausible at all: The Ganges was a river sacred to Hindus.

Lessing, no doubt, hoped for a day when Hindu, Muslim and Jew could gather by the banks of such a river and sit under the proverbial fig tree that Jesus spoke about in the Gospel of John. Lessing was a polemicist more than he was a compelling dramatist.

A convenient fire

When the play opens, we learn that a fire in Nathan's home almost killed his daughter. Muslims and Christian Crusaders were known to attack Jewish homes, but Lessing overlooked that tidbit; he treated the fire simply as a device to introduce a boy and a girl. They "meet cute," as Hollywood used to say, and fall in love.

Lessing shows that the Templar is torn between his fascination with Nathan's daughter and his feeling that it is impermissible to wed a Jew. But the playwright fails to note the equally strong feeling by Jews that dating a gentile is unthinkable. Nathan fails to recoil in horror at this possibility because, as scripted by Lessing, he is a wise man who surely must welcome the prospect that people of different religions will love one another.

The Berlin version

Nathan the Wise can be played as a tragic drama. But this translation (by Edward Kemp) and staging (by Abigail Adams), makes a good case for treating it as a romantic comedy. (Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice originated as a romantic comedy, with Shylock disposed of in Act IV and all of Act V devoted to the happy ending for the lovers.)

In a recent Berlin production of Nathan the Wise, Christians and Muslims celebrate at the final curtain while shutting the door on the Jew. Here at Malvern, all join hands together. A nice touch by director Adams is a wary pause by Nathan before he takes the others' hands in celebration. Mostly, though, this interpretation stresses the humorous side of multiple misunderstandings.

Nathan vs. Tevye

Throughout the play we hear talk about how the Templar resembles the sultan's late brother, and how the Templar also looks familiar to the Jew. Hints are abundant, so it's not surprising to find a double ending with multiple revelations. I'm reminded of Il Trovatore, where the count executes his rival, only to hear his mother exclaim: "He was your brother!"

Then my mind turns to Fiddler on the Roof, also about a clever Jew who suffers discrimination. With a few quips, the playwright Joseph Stein established early on, that Tevye the milkman is wiser than his lowly social status might suggest. Lessing, on the other hand, provides no evidence of Nathan's wisdom until the second act. For the longest while we are forced to accept Nathan's complimentary moniker on faith.

Then, at last, we see his cleverness. When asked by Saladin which religion is best, Nathan responds with a parable whose moral is that each man should live by the religion in which he was raised.

An anti-Jewish canard

Despite his good intentions, Lessing's play inadvertently repeats an anti-Jewish slur. One of his characters praises Nathan by saying: "He does not lend money like other Jews." In fact, Jews in the Holy Land in the 12th Century weren't commonly moneylenders. Jews didn't gravitate to that profession until later, in European countries where they were barred from other businesses.

Notwithstanding all this criticism, I still found Nathan the Wise fascinating. It's utopian and unrealistic but Lessing's idealism was formidable. What matters is not whether this story could have happened but rather that one 19th-Century visionary believed that it should happen.

The production is attractive, with excellent acting by David Strathairn, Brian Anthony Wilson, Luigi Sottile, Stephen Novelli and Saige Thompson as the effervescent daughter, Rachel.♦


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