Lessons abound in Jewish theatre’s season opener

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This article was published 20/09/2024 (739 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Harry Nelken’s birthday is June 9.

“Ask me what year,” the actor says.

“Well, you said you were born in 1947 so…” the reporter responds.

“No,” Nelken interrupts. “Ask me what year.”

The reporter gives in. “OK, what year?”

“Every year.”

It’s a cheesy punchline that Nelken delivers with sweet relish and mustard, his eyes twinkling with the glimmer of a job well done, having passed on a literally timeless grain of Zaida humour to the next generation of punsters.

For Nelken, who has acted on Winnipeg stages since hearing an open call for auditions on CJOB for the musical Bells Are Ringing in 1970, generosity of spirit is the key to performance, and probably, to life itself.

The latest character the veteran actor — born in a refugee camp in Austria to a pair of Holocaust survivors — is tasked with embodying has a similar outlook, though the wisdom he shares is more on the nose, coloured by his proximity to the finish line. The amiable Morrie Schwartz, a Brandeis sociology professor diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, holds the cards he’s dealt and refuses to fold without seeing the hand through, managing the fate of degenerative fatality with a clear-eyed sense of purpose.

In the mid-1990s, Schwartz’s admirable ideology — and his ability to laugh at himself despite his grim forecast — became bestselling fodder for his former student Mitch Albom, then a columnist at the Detroit Free Press, who until reconnecting with his old professor focused his energies mostly on covering star athletes, not the domestic affairs of semi-obscure academic types.

Twenty million copies sold later, Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie remains a cornerstone in the ever-expanding literary canon of grief, later adapted for film — starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria — and for the stage. (Winnipeg’s Len Cariou played Morrie in a well-received off-Broadway production this spring).

A two-hander, the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s season-opening production (on now until Sept. 29 and directed by Mariam Bernstein) stars Nelken and Calgary’s David Sklar, who didn’t struggle to find corollaries between himself and the agitated, overworked columnist gradually softened by his former mentor’s knowing touch.

“As an actor, we run around like chickens loose. Here we have this audition, there we have that callback, always moving around. We don’t have a regular, nine-to-five kind of job where we know what exactly our career is going to look like. There’s a hustle,” says Sklar, a 38-year-old who’s felt the pains of that race.

Sklar first encountered Albom’s book as a teenager, but was reintroduced to it in preparation for his Zoom audition.

“When I got the part and started to re-read it again, I described it as something that’s simple and easy to read, yet it’s something you might want to re-read every year. It’s almost like the bible, where you go back and start from page one because there are so many valuable life lessons in it that you need to tell yourself again and again and again,” he says.

An early lesson surrounds Mitch’s teenage ambition to be a jazz pianist, one encouraged by Dr. Schwartz in contrast with Albom’s parents, who’d prefer he become a lawyer.

Sklar’s dad was a lawyer, but put no pressure on him to follow in his footsteps. Instead, his parents were warm to his artistic aspirations, taking him to the Stratford Festival at 10 years old.

“From a young kid, I always wanted to be an actor,” he says.

The young Nelken had a different path in mind.

“We came here in 1948, and I remember accompanying my mother to a shoemaker. He had a long leather vest, the pins in his mouth, and there was the smell of leather, so I wanted to be a shoemaker,” recalls Nelken, whose mother was a teacher and whose father was a semi-professional gambler.

Diverting from that road, Nelken took the LSAT, but received a poor verdict. He started but didn’t finish a master’s in criminology and committed to acting soon after hearing a call for auditions on the radio.

“Communication, and words, are the things that I love, and to get in touch with myself when I did a role, I learned about myself in ways I never anticipated. There’s a common humanity in it,” he says.

Sklar and Nelken both found a wealth of that quality in the script for Morrie, co-written by Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher, which to each actor seemed to transcend religion while also cutting close to central Jewish tenets.

“At its core, these values are very, very Jewish right?” asks Sklar, whose frenetic energy contrasts well against Nelken’s learned relaxation — one slinks in his chair and the other compelled to move.

“How to live a meaningful life. The things that Morrie offers are Talmud-esque, in a sense. Tikkun olam. These values of giving back, of being the human you want to be, not just to take, take, take — but to give. That’s how you know you’re living. We don’t delve a lot into Jewish identity in this show, but these are two characters infused and defined by their Jewishness, even if not in terms of religiosity.”

“It’s ultimately about how to be a mensch,” determines Sklar.

Almost on cue, Nelken notices a bit of lint on his castmate’s shoulder, reaching over to quietly remove the fluff. Menschlachkeit is what you display when you don’t think anyone is watching.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com