Interview with Adam Barken


At the exact moment that the Canadian Jewish News was faxing us a review of Reading Hebron, playwright Adam Barken walked in the front door and was drawn into conversation with Susannah Schmidt about the play. Adam saw Reading Hebron at its first public reading. He was also part of the Writer's Unit at the Tarragon Theatre two years ago, where he met Jason Sherman.

So we were chatting about the review of Reading Hebron headlined "Reading Hebron's Humour Offensive." You were going to tell me your thoughts on the reviewer's particular criticism of the joke "there is no business like Shoah business."

That particular criticism was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. When I was in the Tarragon Playwrights' Unit, Jason was writer in residence there, and I quite liked him and we got to be good friends. And so Jason was a David Mamet fan like me. And that joke-- there's no business like Shoah business-- is one that I remember reading in an essay in one of Mamet's latest books of essays, which Jason must have read too [Sherman lists the Mamet essay in Reading Hebron's bibliography]. It's an essay in which he just goes after Schindler's List, the Stephen Spielberg movie.

Mamet describes Schindler's List as a melodrama, to make Jews feel better, because they'd watch themselves in such pain. And so he thought it was just an atrocious thing. In the essay Mamet compares Schindler's List with two jokes told to him by Jews in Israel. Now, Mamet is increasingly [becoming] an Orthodox Jew with very religious tendencies, and these are the jokes: Why did Hitler kill himself? He got his gas bill. And the second: there's no business like Shoah business.

And Mamet says, is it horrific? You bet. Is it terrible? Yes. But it's a way of dealing with an inexplicable horror, and that is the purpose of it. And so he was saying that that joke was better than Schindler's List.

It's interesting that the writer would take such offense at that and level that at Jason, when including that joke was not just for a humour factor but probably also some cultural commentary on different attitudes in the Jewish community, I mean, in Israel!

Humour is certainly for this century one of the only truly legitimate ways it seems that artists have to deal with what has been the worst century on record. You know, Nabakov said, the only thing that separates comic and cosmic is one letter, and there's something in that.

And it makes perfect sense that that writer would take such offense. He's looking at it from a particular place.

From a political place?

Yes, and he's not accepting the theatre as a place to air what would otherwise seem to be truly difficult and possibly even offensive ideas.. as an open forum for that. And it's something that lots of Jewish writers have dealt with before, that when in attempting to look at the Jewish psyche, there's going to be a segment, as with any group of people, who feel they are being insulted. And worse, they're being insulted by one of their own, which can be considered as the greatest sin. And Jason's a smart guy, so he could not help but know he was going to get that kind of reaction. The same kind of thing as in The Retreat, but in The Retreat, he got more, he was given more leeway, the humour was gentler. The story seemed to be less dire.

Probably Jason took it up before the time that people could laugh about it, in that horrific strange way... it was too close. But you've got to strike when the iron's hot.

What was your favorite part in the play?

There's this marvelous moment when Nathan's speaking to the guy at the Israeli embassy, played by Earl Plaskow. And there's this sense that the bureaucrat goes back and forth from being very polite to being a rabid zionist. It spoke volumes about Nathan's paranoia.