New Jerusalem

TRIAL BY JEWRY Easton, left, examines Strong crossly.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Young Baruch de Spinoza, the thoughtful central figure of David Ives’s theological courtroom drama New Jerusalem, hardly fits the usual profile of a menace to society. As played with gentle conviction by the gifted Jeremy Strong, he is sweet, patient and tolerant of those who do not share his irreverent ideas about the nature of God: the kind of revolutionary rationalist philosopher you wouldn’t mind taking your daughter to the prom. To his fellow Jews in 1656 Amsterdam, however, Spinoza is a threat—not just because his unorthodox ideas contradict their common faith, but also because, in spreading them, he risks incurring the wrath of a Christian community whose forbearance only extends so far.

In Ives’s play, Spinoza is brought before an assembly of his coreligionists, like a lamb to the Passover slaughter, and forced to defend himself against charges of heresy; the penalty, should he fail, is excommunication. Ives distills Spinoza’s views with cogency and sympathy; less felicitous are the mechanistic contrivances of the plot, which is burdened with many unpersuasive changes of heart, and the general air of anachronism that hangs over the proceedings. Richard Easton and David Garrison make the most of their roles as Spinoza’s primary interrogators. But Fyvush Finkel and Jenn Harris are deeply out of period here—the brand of Jewishness they embody is distractingly modern and Ashkenazi, not 17th-century and Sephardic—and Walter Bobbie’s direction often aggregates the problem. The historical import of Spinoza’s thought might emerge with greater power if his opponents were more than shtick figures.

—Adam Feldman