Two Quarreling Jews

The Quarrel follows Rabbi Hersh Rasseyner (Avi Hoffman) and journalist Chaim Kovler (Chaz Mena) through a day in a Montreal park. They are old friends, long estranged, each of whom thought the other dead. It is 1948, and they have only narrowly survived Hitler's Europe. After their happy embraces, the...

By Brandon K. Thorp

April 29, 2010

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The Quarrel follows Rabbi Hersh Rasseyner (Avi Hoffman) and journalist Chaim Kovler (Chaz Mena) through a day in a Montreal park. They are old friends, long estranged, each of whom thought the other dead. It is 1948, and they have only narrowly survived Hitler's Europe. After their happy embraces, the men take up their old arguments: Does God exist? And if He does, is He good? These arguments, so often facile games of intellectual one-gunmanship, are given gravitas by the men's shared history and by the necessary uses to which they have put their respective cosmologies — to keep the past in the past, and to keep it live-withable. What results from their fight, and from Mena and Hoffman's soulful and naturalistic acting, is a play that is slow but elegiac and lovely.
Sun., May 9, 7 p.m., 2010

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