The chosen play

MOSES SUPPOSES Leigh puts Jewish belief under the microscope.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

“Here’s my Jewish play,” Mike Leigh writes in his introduction to the published script of Two Thousand Years. “I’ve been threatening to do it for years, but I haven’t felt ready until now.” After more than 20 plays and 10 feature films (including Oscar-nominated screenplays for Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake), the 64-year-old English writer-director finally turned his eye on his own ethnic heritage in an intense comedy-drama that asks what it really means to be Jewish. Is it defined by pious belief or, as one character kvetches, “visiting your family for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon and finding yourself in the middle of a fucking war zone”?

As a “Jew who doesn’t bother to be a Jew very much,” Leigh, 64, says in a phone conversation from London—where he is about to release his latest movie, Happy Go Lucky—it was “a very big deal to decide to, as it were, ‘come out.’ ” Two Thousand Years (now receiving its American premiere by the New Group at Theatre Row), presents a totally secular and assimilated bourgeois London Jewish family undergoing various crises of faith and conscience.

Like Leigh himself, the middle-aged parents hail from a Socialist Zionist background and retain their utopian leftist passion, but have grown disillusioned with Israel. Their cosmopolitan daughter (Natasha Lyonne) makes her parents proud as an international human-rights activist, but their son horrifies them when he turns to Orthodox Judaism for answers. The work crackles with Leigh’s signature humor (a characteristically Jewish sense of tragicomedy, he feels), but underneath it seems to lie, in the laudatory words of Guardian critic Michael Billington, an exploration of “the loss of faith” in “a world in which people have increasingly lost their beliefs in politics, religion and social progress.”

Leigh is acutely aware the piece touches sensitive nerves for many Jews, especially in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. “I wanted to enter the debate with a play that I hope isn’t crudely propagandistic,” he says, “but works through characters that are three-dimensional and viewed sympathetically, debating things in a rational way.”

Leigh’s legendary empathy for his characters derives from a highly collaborative working process, which begins without any story at all, developing a script through extensive conversations and improvisations with the actors. Leigh pioneered the approach in the London fringe scene with his first play in 1965. Two Thousand Years, first produced by the Royal National Theatre in 2005, marked his return to the stage after 12 years. Rehearsing over four months in the summer of ’05, Leigh was able to incorporate such breaking news as the London Underground bombing, the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and even Hurricane Katrina. While the script is very specifically set against the backdrop of that moment in time, Leigh hopes today “the currency of those immediate events transcends their transient nature and becomes metaphorical.”

New Group artistic director Scott Elliott looks forward to New York’s response to Two Thousand Years—a title referencing the history of the worldwide Jewish Diaspora. Leigh may come from Manchester and his characters from North London, but Elliott was delighted to find how much the play “echoes the vibe of my own Long Island Jewish family.”

Having built much of his company’s reputation on American premieres of Leigh’s plays (this marks the fifth, following up the 2005 success of Abigail’s Party), Elliott attributes their success to the “incredible amount of emotion” they generate both onstage and in the house. “People never laugh or cry fakely at his plays,” the director maintains. As for whether those emotions get especially heated in our current volatile political climate, Elliott welcomes provocation and discussion. “Well, I hope some people get pissed off,” he half-jokes. “These characters speak a lot of people’s fears and doubts.”

Some spectators will probably feel similarly to one character’s reaction to an op-ed column he reads: “I’m confused. One minute I agree with him, the next minute I don’t.” In the millennial upheaval of Two Thousand Years, though, ideological consistency gives way to the more complex emotional pulls between family members. It’s in keeping with an artist whose anthropological eye has made the political very personal for more than 40 years. “Of all the plays and films I’ve done,” Leigh notes, “seldom have I done one about characters who are so concerned about what’s going on in the world.”

Two Thousand Years is at the New Group @ Theatre Row.