By Cynthia Citron
STUDIO CITY, California–He is a non-observant Jew, she is an ardent Catholic, and they meet cute. He sees her through the front window of an art gallery in Soho and jumps out of his Uber to meet her. He bumbles awkwardly through an introduction and she, for some inexplicable reason, is charmed.
Thus begins writer/director Dan Frischman’s dramedy Sex, Faith, and Jason Wexler. But unfortunately, Abie’s Irish Rose it isn’t.
After three weeks of nightly phone calls, some lasting four to six hours, he takes her to an outdoor concert in Central Park. After a few more dates he takes her to his apartment, where she sidetracks his advances by confessing that she is still a virgin. And that opens up their first intense discussion of their respective religions.
He, Jason, is an atheist—-or at least an agnostic—-with a loose connection to Judaism. She, Faith, is solidly inflexible in her devotion to every tenet of Catholicism and she is determined to remain so. She has her faith and she adamantly refuses to offer him hope or charity.
But that doesn’t deter her from offering him sex. In repeated bouts of extended grunting and moaning they bring each other to orgasm without having actual intercourse, and it’s not a pretty sight. The actors are frigid and rigid and you don’t believe either of them for an instant. No matter how many times they do it.
And so they decide they are madly in love. She, however, repeats what she told him when they first started their relationship: she could never marry anyone who wasn’t Catholic. With this said, she begins trying to manipulate him into converting. She provides him with a gazillion-paged book of Catechism. She drags him to a Mass at her church, where he is duly impressed with the architecture but confounded by the Eucharist; he is amazed that she says she derives comfort from eating and drinking the flesh and blood of Christ, even symbolically. And he supplies his own imagined subtext to the preacher’s sermon. At the end, however, he does participate in the ritual in which everyone shakes hands with his neighbor and wishes him peace.
Meanwhile, he meets her father, a deacon at the church, who launches into an updated version of the familiar and thoroughly un-ingratiating claim that “some of my best friends are Jewish” and winds it all up by singing a garbled verse of “Hava Negila.”
The father appears again in a furiously riveting scene in which he and a female rabbi circle Jason menacingly and taunt him for the uncertainty of his convictions and the purported disasters that will accrue to him if he makes the wrong religious choice.
Earlier, the rabbi had made a provocative argument of her own. She evoked the memory of Hitler’s decision to eliminate all the world’s Jewry and added that every time a Jew marries out of the religion “he completes the work of Hitler.”
Jason is also grappling with the thought that if he marries Faith their children would have to be brought up as Catholics and he is appalled by the idea that “my kids would bow down to statues of dead people…”
And so it goes. The second act is considerably better than the first, which is overly long and repetitious. The ending, which is definitive, is also vaguely ambivalent, for Jason’s last words are “Peace be with you.”
Sex, Faith, and Jason Wexler is presented by the Two Roads Theatre and is double-cast. In the performance that I saw, Jason was played by Justin Truesdale, Faith by Alexandra Bayless, Faith’s father by Curtis Webster, and the rabbi by Sharon Spence. Jason’s friend Randy was played by Tony Nunes, and a cameo part as Golf Guy was played by writer/director Dan Frischman.
Two Roads Theatre is located at 4348 Tujunga Ave. in Studio City, where this play will run Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 through April 3rd. Call (800) 838-3006 for reservations or visit www.SexFaithPlay.com for online ticketing.
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Citron is a freelance writer who specializes in coverage of the dramatic arts. She may be contacted via cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)
