POSNER

Center State taps Posner to direct 'The Chosen'

By JEWISH REVIEW

article created on: 2009-03-15T00:00:00

Portland Center Stage will present a dramatic adaptation of Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel “The Chosen” as part of its 2009-2010 season.

The novel—about two teenage Jewish boys who form a friendship even though they come from different worlds—takes place over a period of three years in the 1940s in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and unfolds against a backdrop of World War II, the Holocaust, the death of President Roosevelt and the emergence of the modern state of Israel.

This story was first dramatized as a film in 1981 featuring actors Maximilian Schell, Rod Steiger, Robby Benson and Barry Miller. “The Chosen” was first presented on stage in 1999.

Aaron Posner will direct the PCS production. He previously adapted and directed Ken Kesey’s novel “Sometimes a Great Notion” for PCS.

Also of interest to the Jewish community at PCS next season will be the musical “Ragtime,” based on E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel of the same name about turn-of-the-century America with a look at the interplay between the immigrant Jewish, gentile and African American communities.

The upcoming playbill also will include “Thurgood” (about Justice Thurgood Marshall), “Christmas Carol,” “Santaland Diaries,” “Snow Falling on Cedars” (a Japanese-American drama set on a fictional island in the waters north of Puget Sound), “The 39 Steps” (of Alfred Hitchcock fame), “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (about a formerly enslaved man living in a Pittsburgh boarding house for blacks), “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” (a one-act musical comedy) and something called “The Best So Far” (which we couldn’t quite figure out).