SOLOMONS’ CHOICE
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Carol and Ben Solomon live with the latter’s mother, Lena, in a Skokie bungalow. Frances and Tim Donahue live on a dairy farm in Kenosha. Paths and swords cross when Mark Solomon and Anne Marie Donahue announce that they are in love and intend to marry. The bride’s mother and the groom’s mother and grandmother voice their disapproval in no uncertain terms (the two fathers bond immediately and get on amiably throughout), but the children remain adamant in their proposal to merge. Then a second complication develops: Mark has grown up believing Carol and Ben to be his true parents, but in fact he is his father’s son by a former marriage–to one Elizabeth Colleen O’Connor. By genealogical custom this means that Mark, though reared as a Jew, must undergo the three-year conversion process.
A year and a half later, the couple is happily married and living in a house with a menorah on the mantelpiece and a Christmas tree in the bay window–but tensions have not abated between the newlyweds and their in-laws. Furthermore, Mark’s studies have made him so aware of his Judaic heritage that he finally declares to his wife that he cannot in good conscience permit his child to be raised in both their faiths. This countermands their prenuptial agreement, and Anne Marie, now nine months pregnant, is understandably distressed. For a while it seems to be a problem even the original Solomon couldn’t have solved. But wise Grandma Lena comes through with a solution that restores harmony–albeit an uneasy harmony–to all concerned.
Though National Jewish Theater hires professionals, it might be more properly called a community theater serving the predominantly Jewish communities based in Skokie and other nearby suburbs. (Scheduled for January 9-13 are performances of Solomons’ Choice translated into Russian for the benefit of newly arrived immigrants from the Soviet Union.) The problems explored in Solomons’ Choice are universal, however. As much as we might want to believe otherwise, the decision to marry outside of one’s tribe–whether the barriers are religious, ethnic, economic, sexual, or chronological–is still a very serious matter in virtually all segments of our heterogeneous society. Whatever its literary shortcomings, Solomons’ Choice argues a salient point–that though one’s cultural identity is necessary and important, life is to be valued above all. In the grim dawn of 1991, facing what could be another divisive war for our increasingly factionalized citizenry, it’s hard to dispute that.
