Review: 'a walk with Mr. Heifetz' stumbles through history

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February 21, 2018 4:39 AM

The famed violinist Jascha Heifetz has gone for a walk with a stranger in the hills of Palestine. Now that they’re up there, he isn’t quite sure what the point is.

It is 1926, and Heifetz has just given a concert. Is that three-piece suit what he wore onstage? He’s dour, in any case, and the garrulous exuberance of his companion — a kibbutz choirmaster named Yehuda Sharett — does nothing to alleviate his mood.

“Why did you bring me here, Mr. Sharett?” Heifetz asks, his patience thinning.

Through much of the first act of “A Walk With Mr. Heifetz,” a world-premiere play by cultural journalist James Inverne, the audience may be puzzling, too, wondering why the bored and irritated Heifetz (Adam Green) doesn’t simply leave.

The answer, alas, is that the author is keeping him there to force a conversation. Directed by Andrew Leynse for Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theater, “A Walk With Mr. Heifetz” is a play constructed for the sake of an argument. Inspired by real people and events in the decades leading up to the foundation of Israel, Inverne wants to make a point about the vital role of music in establishing a culture and knitting together a new nation.

Thus the buttonholing of the comparatively decadent Heifetz by the idealistic Yehuda (Yuval Boim), who is determined to use his own music for social good. Way off in the future, Yehuda will become an important Israeli composer. His more formal elder brother, Moshe (Erik Lochtefeld, dependably fun to watch), an alpha-politician, will serve as the nation’s second prime minister.

But for all the biography in it, this play is an awkward amalgam of hastily sketched history, which will read clearly only to those who already know it, and stories told in detail to characters who would surely not be hearing them for the first time.

The two acts take place about 20 years apart, ending on the other side of World War II, and a timeline in the program provides some context. M.L. Dogg’s sound design, too, helps to locate us in history at the top of Act II. It wasn’t clear for a while, though, which country Yehuda and Moshe were in then; at the end of Act I, Yehuda seemed to be leaving Palestine.

Intermittently, a violinist (Mariella Haubs) roams Wilson Chin’s jagged-edged, reversible set, handsomely lit by John Froelich. Her playing is a salutary addition to a show that often aims much higher than it can reach.

So it goes with art-making. “My dream is getting as close to what I hear in my head as I can,” Heifetz says. Yet he knows that ambition and achievement won’t ever match up.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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