THEATRE REVIEW: CIRCUMCISE ME!
27 OCT/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 3.5/5

TORONTO - In a world of televangelism and partisan politics, we’ve become so inured to those who insist on preaching to the converted that we almost expect it. And we can all list a number of folks who are guilty of the crime.

But now, it seems, the converted are starting to preach right back. Although “preaching” isn’t really the right world for what Yisrael Campbell (or Christopher Campbell, as he was christened in his infancy) is doing in a show he’s brought from New York to Toronto at the invitation of the Harold Green Jewish Theatre.

The show, which opened a limited run at the Jane Mallett Theatre Wednesday, is titled CIRCUMCISE ME! and, while it deals with Campbell’s long and often funny journey from booze-and-drug addled lapsed Catholic to devout Orthodox Jew and family man, there is little in the way of proselytizing involved. Instead, it emerges as one man’s journey into faith — a journey that started, Campbell suggests, when he was introduced to a little book called Exodus, a book that left the already unhappy (and clearly botanically challenged) youth dreaming of moving to Israel and “digging avocados out of the desert.”
Instead, he moved to Florida, having, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, kicked a major substance abuse problem before he was out of high school. From there, he seems to have followed the path of least resistance, which led him inevitably to Los Angeles and put him on a collision course with Judaism.

Mind you, as he tells it, he pretty much had to throw himself in front of the truck to make that collision happen — but after taking a course in the fundamentals of the religion, he was curious enough about it that he began to explore the possibilities of becoming a Jew himself. Conversion proved a complex affair, requiring him, first of all, to answer five basic and fundamental questions that required a good deal of soul searching, then progressed through the mikveh, a ritual bath and other requirements.

Inevitably, there was the question of circumcision, perhaps the most enduring manifestation of the Jewish people’s covenant with their God — and, not entirely coincidentally, a surgical procedure the mere mention of which can induce pallor and sweating in most grown men. On the plus side, Campbell, like many men of a certain age, had endured the procedure as an infant, which meant he could get by with a (relatively) simple bit of ritual bloodletting in the same area as opposed to the full monty as it were.

But while most of us can appreciate the difference between simply nicking a finger and slicing off the end of one, it was nonetheless a procedure Campbell endured not once but twice as he continually upped his commitment to Judaism, progressing from the Reformed branch to the Conservative before finally coming to rest in the Orthodox branch after he had relocated to Jerusalem. Along the way, he married his Talmud teacher, became a father and found personal peace and a strong sense of community, without ever losing his delightful sense of humour.

Directed by Sam Gold, with a video design by Aaron Rhyne that is either highly arty or simply badly focused — depending on one’s point of view — CIRCUMCISE ME! never stoops to preaching to the unconverted, even while it emerges as a bit of an inside joke on occasion. But if one listens very carefully, one hears overtones of a universal tale — one that involves faith, to be certain, but also talks meaningfully and with gentle wit about the value of personal struggle and the healing powers of belonging.