by Tony Kushner
DICK
Sorry, I was finishing the seventy-fifth volume of my memoirs and geopolitical stratagems. Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I have to stop writing.
ALGER
You should be punctual.
DICK
Too many (expletive deleted) meetings. Too many (expletive deleted) GOP ideologues, hounding me, hounding me. “Dick, you were never a true conservative.” “Dick, you were (expletive deleted) Leonid Brezhnev.” Wage-and-Price-Control-Dick, they call me—last of the tax-and-spend liberals: “Ten steps to the left of Bill (expletive deleted) Clinton.” I hate it here! I have always been a . . . a thinker! I want to go to Heaven, where people still believe in government. I want some (expletive deleted) respect.
ALGER
But you know, Dick, they despise you up there.
DICK
Yeah, well sticks and stones and (expletive deleted).
ROY
We hate him down here, too. The man’s entirely devoid of charm. He’s hated everywhere. It’s a talent he has.
DICK
Bob Dole likes me. And the rest of you can go (expletive deleted) yourselves. Heaven is all (inaudible) and (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted), but at least I can hope for some intelligent conversation. I—Oh, what the (expletive deleted) is it now?
(The “Glinda” entrance music is heard. A bubble with an oily iridescent sheen descends from the lighting grid. Out steps a dumpy man with a face like a Walt Kelly bulldog, wearing a black Chanel dress, hose and stiletto pumps on which he teeters uncertainly.)
DICK
And that’s another thing I hate about this place! The gender confusion!
ALGER
I’m with you on that one, Dick, but it’s worse in Heaven!
ROY
Dave, may I present: The Son of the New Morning! Mary!
DAVID
It looks like J. Edgar Hoover, Roy.
EDGAR
Hello, Girls! Heard there was a new arrival, thought it might be Arthur Finkelstein.
DAVID
Roy, I’m real confused.
EDGAR
Of course you are, beautiful.
ROY
You always were . . .
AND IT GOES ON
Notes on Akiba
This is of course for Michael Mayer—my best girlfriend, who else?
Notes on Akiba was performed at The Jewish Museum’s Third Seder on April 13, 1995, in New York City. Neil Goldberg, Joan Hocky and Alicia Suigals were the Producers, Aviva Weintraub was the Program Director, Karen Sherman was the Stage Manager, Allessandro Cavadini was the Technical Director and Troy Matthews provided technical support. The piece was read by Tony Kushner (Michael) and Michael Mayer (Tony).
Author’s Note
The historical information contained in this piece comes from a variety of sources, my usual rabbinate: Bloom, Scholem, Yerushalmi, Steinsaltz; and an important new guest at the table, Ira Steingroot. Everything factual in the piece, indeed everything you could ever want to know about Passover, can be found in Steingroot’s remarkable, indispensable, delightful and erudite Keeping Passover, published by Harper Collins.
This piece is exegesis, not autobiography. My father does not skip, he is a menschlakh elaborator. He is praiseworthy.
Many thanks to Norman Kleeblatt and The Jewish Museum, and especially to The Klezmatics for including this in their Third Seder, on the occasion of which this was written.
Two gay Jewish men, Michael, in his mid-thirties, and Tony, forty, sit at a table, facing each other. They are making charoset: chopped nuts, apples, spice and wine. The table is covered with the ingredients: just-peeled apples, the peels strewn about; piles of shelled nuts; a bottle of Schapiro’s Extra Heavy Malaga, Kosher for Passover (“Wine So Thick You Can Cut It with a Knife!”); ginger root; cinnamon; cardamom; cloves; a jar of honey. There are knives, two chopping boards and a big heavy bowl into which the chopped ingredients are placed. There are also two large green leeks on the table, and a box of matzoh. They turn to the audience.)
TONY
This is Michael Mayer.
MICHAEL
This is Tony Kushner. These are notes on Akiba. This is exegesis, or, elaboration.
(As they talk, they chop.)
TONY
OK OK let me begin by apologizing, OK, so I wrote this in a hurry so I wrote this in haste so I wrote this on the fly on a fucking AIRPLANE I wrote this so it’s not funny so it makes no sense so it doesn’t work so don’t laugh so don’t come so sue me it’s not like anyone’s paying me to do this, not like anyone’s paying me to do this and HIM, he never saw the script before an hour ago, so forget memorizing it he is totally confused but the haste is appropriate, the airline is appropriate, I travel too much, my father was a wandering Aramaean, alright, so sue me, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE ANYWAY don’t you have company coming tomorrow night shouldn’t you be at home now on your hands and knees scouring for Chametz DID YOU GET EVERY CRUMB ARE YOU SURE? HE is not responsible for this the Klezmatics are not responsible for this the clarinetist is so hot he reminds me of my father shouldn’t you be at home cooking for your father don’t you have company have a family have friends have a father coming over what are you an animal or something I worry about you don’t get hurt don’t get shot drive safely wear a condom I alone am responsible I alone bear responsibility I cannot bear the responsibility it is insupportable it is impossible it is imponderable. This, by way of prologue.
(Pause.
They chop apples and nuts.)
MICHAEL
In some Sefardic Seders the celebrants lash each other with leeks.
(They lash each other with leeks.)
TONY
Ow.
MICHAEL
They do this because in the desert the people complained to Moses, missing the fish and onions they enjoyed eating in Egypt. The leek lashing is to remind them that there is a high price to pay for tasty things sometimes. The price for fish and leeks in Egypt was the lash. The Passover practice, in coastal villages of the Mediterranean, of lashing each other with fish, died out by the fourth century C.E.; Hellenizing influences are credited with the eventual replacement of fish whips with the more manageable leek.
The more one elaborates.
TONY
Elaborates. E-LAB-OR-ATES. Elaborates.
MICHAEL
On the departure from Egypt the more praiseworthy one is.
(They chop.)
TONY
But my father skipped it.
MICHAEL
Everyone does.
TONY
So I said to him, you skip it!
MICHAEL
Everyone does.
TONY
Every year. Right after the Four Questions. Do the Four Questions and then start the story and then you get to that bit and then, SKIP.
MICHAEL
The Fier Kashe.
(Pause.)
TONY
Right.
MICHAEL
I like saying the Hebrew. Fier Kashe. The delicious nasalities, the slides, the wide open vowel sounds, the abrupt syncopation.
TONY
They skip it because it’s like, oh, it’s like one of those medieval Jewish numerological things, one of those . . . (Gestures)
MICHAEL
Every letter has a value.
TONY
So he said of course he said I don’t skip it.
MICHAEL
Oh bullshit.
TONY
But he does. Who doesn’t? Everyone does.
MICHAEL
“Echad,” the Hebrew word for “One,” has letters the numerological value of which add up to thirteen: hence the thirteen verses in the game that begins, “Who knows one,” hence, “Who knows thirteen I know thirteen thirteen are God’s attributes etc.”
TONY
These attributes, by the way, what are they?
MICHAEL
They are immensely potent emenatory dem
i-divine entities suffused throughout the world of prayerful visionary journeying as mystical lights as described in Kaballah, Jewish magic.
TONY
A nervy thing to invoke at the tail end of what is let’s face it a children’s counting game.
MICHAEL
We read in the Zohar that—
TONY
But what really makes my gorge rise is that he can’t admit he skips the whole, you know, that part that bit that Tarphon that whatsisname . . .
MICHAEL
Akiba.
TONY
Right, Akiba, that bit which everyone skips because it’s like who knows what it’s about so like what is the big fucking deal about skipping it. I’ve only been going to his Seder for forty years practically and I like think I would know if he skips it or not and believe me he skips it but what’s sick is that he can’t admit he skips it because you know why? Because his FATHER never skipped anything not one part not one bit not one word of Hebrew every word, every detour and digression, with his father they would sit for hours and hours the Seder would take hours, and he of course cannot is like molecularly incapable of conceiving that he maybe does less than his FATHER did because it’s like Jewish men, it’s this sick thing, isn’t it, it’s this sick thing, this sick sick sick sick sick thing they have with their fathers, all Jewish men have it or is it all men period or is it just me? It’s sick. I told him that.
MICHAEL
What?
TONY
That it’s sick, sick, a crazy competitive . . . and—
MICHAEL
What did he say?
TONY
He said, “It’s . . . That’s a sick thing to say to your father.” But. I mean really, like, out of the house of bondage, right?
MICHAEL
Totally.
TONY
I mean please.
(Pause.
They put the chopped apples and nuts in the bowl.
Michael adds spices while talking.)
MICHAEL
A favorite Passover treat of Jewish American kids of the ’30s,’40s and ’50s was to break up matzoh crackers, remember when we used to call them matzoh crackers, my family did—anyway I grew up in Maryland—was to break up matzoh crackers into a bowl and cover the broken pieces with condensed milk and Fox’s U-Bet Syrup and then with a fork you mash the pieces and the condensed milk and syrup into a sticky lavender-gray gluten, a paste. This paste represents the bricking mortar Jews in Mizrayim made with straw before Pharaoh took the straw away, punitively, and then mortar had to be made without straw, which is charoset. The matzoh represents the pious deflation of the pridefulness of man and woman as they approach God during this Holy Week of Remembrance, not puffed up with the yeast of their pretensions and their vainglories. Flat. Broken up in pieces in a bowl, the matzoh means basically the same thing as it does whole, in a box. The condensed milk is known as the Milk of Affliction. It represents canned food, the food of haste, of fallout shelters, especially in the ’50s and early ’60s. The meaning of Fox’s U-Bet Syrup is obscure. It is not a traditional component of Shulchan Arukh, the Prepared Table.
(They chop again.)
TONY
Do you think what I said is like self-hating, the sick thing part, is that—
MICHAEL
No. I mean it’s not necessarily true, but it—
TONY
Oh, it’s true. It is true. It’s just maybe also it’s self-hating, I worry about that because, I love Passover I really do but it’s my family. You skip you don’t elaborate you don’t quibble you don’t haggle you don’t explicate or enumerate or niggle or nitpick, you hasten through the hard parts, you go right from the questions and then skip over these tired old men, who cares about tired old men lets get to the kids, the young people, the wise one and the wicked and the gornisht slow one and the one who knows not what to ask. For whom, specifically, copious elaboration is salutary. But who gets short shrift while everyone is guiltily aware that wedged into this crack between the Questions and The Story and The Kids, between the easy, folksy bits, the stuff about kids that’s basically only in there to keep the kids from sliding under the table or keep them awake or not kicking up fusses because they don’t really care about the Exodus, “for you and not for me,” right, that’s kids, what do kids care about but kids, right, so over the centuries you learn to stick in all this stuff about kids so they stay awake and don’t fidget and you can schlepp nakhes—
MICHAEL
Schepp.
TONY
What?
MICHAEL
You schepp nakhes, you schlepp . . . other things.
(Pause.)
TONY
. . . And, and look how good my kid is he . . . performs, he really performs, he memorizes, he is prepared, a performer, he’s four years old he can barely read Green Eggs and Ham and look he has memorized lengthy strings of what are to him nonsense syllables which he will now produce flawlessly on command because he knows like the whole year to follow and his life along with it will be cursed, the crops will fail and Elijah won’t come because YOU FORGOT WHAT COMES AFTER MA NISHTANAH ETCETERA, and like that’s not affliction?
(Pause.
Then they put the chopped nuts and apples in the bowl.
Michael adds spices.)
MICHAEL
There are fifteen verses to Dayenu. One verse each for each of the steps that led up to the door of the First Temple. Hence the song’s ladder-like structure. Passover songs appeal to children primarily through games of simple mastery, building, accumulating, accelerating, challenges to reading proficiency and lung capacity.
(As they talk, they add honey and spices, and they taste.)
TONY
So now we are going to read and do exegesis on the part everybody skips. “A tale is told of Rabbi Eleazar—
MICHAEL
Eleazar ben Hyrcanus, first and second centuries a Mishnaic sage, a tanna, teacher of Akiba.
TONY
Rabbi Joshua—
MICHAEL
A creator of Post-Temple Judaism. They all were, actually, the ones who survived.
TONY
Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah—
MICHAEL
Named head of the Sanhedrin when he was eighteen.
TONY
Rabbi Akiba—
MICHAEL
Didn’t survive. The greatest Mishnaic Tannaim of them all. When Moses was receiving the Commandments from God on Sinai he asked God why there were all the little curlicues on Hebrew letters, the points and the thorns and God said, “Turn around,” and Moses did and lo, he was looking, two thousand years in the future, looking through a window into Rabbi Akiba’s yeshiva in Bene-Berak, and Akiba was doing exegesis on the five books of Moses which Moses of course had yet to write, and Moses turned back around again and God said, “That man Akiba is so smart he will be able to interpret even the curlicues on the letters of the words of the books you will someday write.”
TONY
Rabbi Tarphon.
MICHAEL
Also didn’t survive. His two most famous sayings are: “The day is short the task is great the workers are lazy the reward is much the Master is insistent.”
TONY
And he also said: “The task cannot be completed by you, but neither are you free to desist from the task.”
MICHAEL
This is from the Haggadah: “A tale is told of Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah and Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarphon who reclined together at Bene-Berak. And they recounted the departure from Egypt all night until their students came to them and said, “Masters, the time has come to recite the morning Shema.”
Said Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, “I am like unto a man seventy years old . . .” This is because his hair had turned white prematurely when, at the age of eighteen, he was made head of the Sanhedrin, and so he was “like” a seventy year old but actually much younger.
