Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart?
If it were up to me, I’d trim down Art Shay’s Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart? and Alan Berks’s Goats and present them as a double bill. These pieces need to be seen together, if at all, because neither is terribly compelling by itself. By far the most interesting thing about them is their uncanny and entirely unintended symmetry.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Some of that symmetry isn’t so much uncanny as serendipitous. Both Goats and Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart? are frankly autobiographical one-man shows, written (and in Berks’s case performed) by Jewish-American males for whom being Jewish-American is a defining characteristic. Both deal mainly with experiences that brought each man to another part of the world and an ostensibly clearer understanding of himself. For the twentysomething Berks, it was the time he spent as a goatherd on a farm in the hills outside Jerusalem, just after the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. For the 80-year-old Shay, it was serving with the Eighth Air Force division, bombing the hell out of German cities during World War II.
Which leads us, at least in my imaginary revision, to Berks. Seemingly lost even before he sets out on his travels, Berks recounts his increasing alienation from his (shiksa?) girlfriend, Catherine, as they bounce between Europe, Chicago, and the Mediterranean, finally careening off in different directions. Berks goes to Israel, thinking to earn some money before pushing east to Asia. Instead he falls in with Shi Zeltzer–a crazy, bearish, Jewish cross between Ken Kesey and Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui guru, Don Juan–who makes exotic goat cheeses and talks, when he feels like it, telepathically. Stuck with Zeltzer, 120 goats, and his own pathetic confusions on an isolated mountain farm as Israeli-Palestinian violence builds around him, Berks discovers a Jewish identity that stretches beyond Shay’s chauvinism and Harmon’s sweet, sad, unfulfilled potential. That turns out, in fact, to be less an identity than a tool for discovery as he seeks out something more profound but as yet unspecified.
