Published: 26 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
At the time, Sherman was firmly a comedy guy. He had recently been a member of the famous Second City comedy troupe, performing in the group at the same time as comedy legend Jim Belushi, and actors George Wendt and Shelly Long, who would both go on to star in Cheers.
And then, one day, Sherman read about a group of Neo-Nazis who had sued local authorities – and later took their case to the Supreme Court – to uphold their rights to march through a Jewish enclave of Skokie, Illinois, his hometown.
Sherman, who grew up in an assimilated household, was stunned. Were there really, he wondered, that many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, as newspapers reported? There were. And this realisation confronted Sherman with how much he took being Jewish for granted.
“I heard this quote once, ‘Whoever discovered water, you can be sure it wasn’t a fish’,” says Sherman – pointing to the reality that you don’t tend to notice whatever surrounds you. “So, growing up in Skokie, surrounded [by Jewish people], I never really thought about being Jewish.”
So, in the early 1980s, when Sherman was in his 20s and wrote The God Of Isaac, he thought of the Skokie incident simply as a dramatic device that would lend his comedy a firm time and place.
The play – which will run at the Darlinghurst Theatre Company in Sydney, from September 5-22 - revolves around a secular Jewish man who, after hearing about an anti-Semitic event in his neighbourhood, embarks on a quest to discover what being Jewish means to him.
Most surrealistically, Isaac is guided in his search by famous characters from popular culture, reimagined if they had been Jewish - for instance, if Marlon Brando’s famous line, in On The Waterfront, was, “I coulda been a mensch”. (Isaac also re-imagines scenes from Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath.)
And, yet, for all its comedy – Sherman, the author of 15 plays, says Second City “still informs my work” - the play rocked the playwright’s identity, which is still evolving.
“The work on the play, in retrospect, I realised became my own journey,” he says.
Here’s the way I describe The God of Isaac. It’s the Jewish Wizard of Oz. A young person goes on a journey, meets a bunch of fun characters along the way, and at the end of the journey, learns that there’s no place like home.
Just the other day, Sherman, a playwriting and improvisation teacher at Columbia College of Chicago, was asked to fill out a survey that required him to identify his ethnicity.
“I would always [in the past] put Caucasian, and then I went, ‘Wait a minute. When the white supremacists show up, I’m not going to be Caucasian. I’m a Jew.’ It’s unavoidable, and ultimately undeniable. So I thought, well, I could check ‘other’, and put ‘Semite’. So I did that, and went, well, if the anti-Semites show up, then I’m a pro-Semite.”
The issue is particularly relevant now given the rise of neo-Nazi incidents, globally, but most dramatically in the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, where, among other incidents, hundreds of white supremacists descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting anti-Jewish threats, wearing swastikas, and doing Nazi salutes.
“Suddenly, discussion of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism and Nazis is relevant again,” says Sherman. “There’s nothing like a Nazi to give one reason to think about one’s Jewish identity, you know?”
Moira Blumenthal, director of the Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s upcoming production of the play, agrees.
“I think the play was prescient,” she says of The God Of Isaac, which has enjoyed revivals all over the world, over the years. “It’s scary that it’s so relevant.”
And, yet, she says, part of the magic of the play is that, because it was written more than 30 years ago, its take on identity is gentler than it would be if it was written now, and as a result, its message about the importance of knowing where you come from is possibly more “palatable”.
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“The play’s got a charm about it,” she says. “I think if he was writing it today, it wouldn’t have, it would be much more serious, much more dangerous.”
Blumenthal points to the end of the play, when Isaac says to his mother that he’s canvassed the opinions of lots of people, and still doesn’t know what it means to be Jewish.
“[She] answers, ‘What are you going to be not Jewish?’ She says, ‘Take a little bit from each person [you’ve met].’ There’s a gentle Jewish wisdom to it, which is what I like.”
This mixture of tones and subject matter in the play – the whimsical, and the serious, the playful, and the sobering – is mirrored by Sherman’s own manner of speaking, over Skype.
One minute, sitting in his kitchen in Chicago, and backed by a framed caricature of the Marx Brothers, the playwright speaks about how he is more politically charged than he was in his 20s.
“I don’t like crowds, so I don’t tend to be really politically active, personally,” says Sherman. “But I suppose if something happened and I had to choose between showing up and not showing up, I think I would be more inclined today, to show up.”
Then, just as quickly, he changes tack. “This is a fascinating discussion, but I don’t want to lose the fact that this is a comedy,” he says, gently, of his play.
“Here’s the way I describe The God of Isaac. It’s the Jewish Wizard of Oz. A young person goes on a journey, meets a bunch of fun characters along the way, and at the end of the journey, learns that there’s no place like home.”
The God Of Isaac, The Darlinghurst Theatre Company, Sydney, runs from September 5-22. Details and tickets here
