The GatherDC blog strives to present a holistic portrait of the DMV’s Jewish community, sharing a wide variety of Jewish voices and perspectives. If you have a 20- or 30-something to nominate as our Jewish Person of the Week or for a Spotted in Jewish DMV feature, please email us!
Jake Loewenthal and I traipse, jean-jacketed and chilly, to Shaw’s The Coffee Bar one afternoon early in the run of Signature Theatre’s Fiddler on the Roof. We chat about the show, hanging out with lawyers, what DC is like for working actors, finding Jewish pockets of intentionality in his schedule, the nervous system, and the moment that a house becomes a home.
Samuel: What brought you to the DMV?
Jake: My partner – a former stage manager – pivoted away from theater, so we came for law school and have been here for about five years now. We love it!
Samuel: What’s keeping you here?
Jake: For me specifically, it’s just such an incredible theater town. There are so many theaters. There’s so much work. When we moved here, I was thinking that I would split my time between here and New York – I didn’t know I could work here full time as an actor. That’s been the greatest gift of DC.
Photo by Christopher Mueller.
Samuel: What is your Jewish community like? Is there a lot of overlap with your theater community?
Jake: The hard thing about being an actor and a Jew is that you have to work at night. You have to do eight shows a week. So, it doesn’t revolve around synagogue as much as it just revolves around meals. And in our house, there’s a cross section of theater and law – there are Jewish actors, and there are Jewish lawyers, and they find their way to our kitchen table. My partner is Jewish, too, so it’s a very Jewish house and I have found a great community of Jewish actors and directors and theater-makers in DC. I worked with Dani Stoller for the first time two years ago – doing Ragtime, which is a Jewish-ish show [Editor’s note: Ragtime is awesome] – and that sort of opened up my Jewish world here.
Samuel: Who’d you play in Ragtime?
Jake: Mother’s Younger Brother.
Samuel: What a great, strange character! As an actor, and therefore someone who doesn’t control your own schedule a lot of the time, how do you bring intentionality into your Jewish practice? You mentioned meals, and the kitchen table – how else do you make time for practicing Judaism?
Jake: One of the things I appreciate about the way I was raised in the Jewish faith is that it is so flexible. It can be so flexible. I know Judaism is very rigid for the people it is rigid for, but what I’ve always appreciated is that it can be what you want it to be, or what you need to get out of it. I almost never have a Friday free. But I have Sunday night; so, how do we turn Sunday night or Monday into this special space? The Sabbath is building a palace in time every week. How do you make those rare evenings you have off something special? How do you carve out that space in the week?
Photo by Daniel Rader.
Samuel: What else is alive for you Jewishly right now?
Jake: I just spent the week up at Olney Theatre Center. I was doing a workshop of this new musical, and it was very funny to be going from one Jewish musical to another. This musical [at Olney] was about a historical figure named Pepi Littman who was sort of an OG drag king in Ukraine at the turn of the century, who was a performer satirizing Orthodox Judaism but was also observant at the same time. It’s so nice to be in predominantly Jewish spaces where everybody has that common jumping off point and speaks the same language.
Samuel: The other show you’re in right now, of course, is Fiddler on the Roof at Signature Theatre. I was surprised to see how long the run is. What goes into your maintenance – physical and mental – process when you need to be doing eight shows a week for basically two full months?
Jake: Every show is different in terms of the preparation you need to have going into every week, every performance. Knocking on all the wood in the world, Fiddler is a bit of an easier lift for me. Motel is such an amazing part because he has a large impact with a small amount of time. He gets a great song in Act One, but that’s like an hour and ten minutes into the show. And then he gets everything he ever dreamed of and gets this happy ending until they get kicked out of Anatevka. So for me, I get to sing a great song, and then I get to support the rest of the story.
I don’t need to be as monastic as I did playing another iconic Jew, Mark Cohen, in Rent four years ago. That required me to…I wasn’t speaking during the day. I had the lemon and the tea and the honey. It’s hard on your knees. You need to go to physical therapy and spend as much time horizontal as you can when you have the downtime.
Samuel: What about the emotional work? What is that process like, as a Jewish actor in this very Jewish show?
Jake: What’s special about Fiddler, especially when the room is mostly Jews – which, Signature did such a great job of casting a lot of Jews to tell this Jewish story – there’s something to be said about the fact that everyone does have some kind of deep emotional connection to this piece. Everyone sees their family, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, and you can just see it in people’s eyes. It bubbles up.
And I feel very much the same way. Some nights, you find yourself incredibly moved. I mean, my grandparents introduced me to this musical. I grew up listening to these songs in my grandmother’s kitchen. The VHS was on loop in my house. I also played this exact role 20 years ago. My best friend played Tevye. At 16 years old. I mean, we were children! So it’s fun when you get to revisit something like that.
[The emotion] finds you. There’s no hiding. And, even if everything is going great in your life, your nervous system doesn’t always know the difference onstage. Sometimes those things sort of creep up on you. Sometimes you see someone in the cast going through it, and you’re like: Oh, their nervous system just surprised them with something, and that’s what’s so cool about theater. It’s giving your body permission to surprise you in front of a few hundred people.
Samuel: When you’re working on a show that’s less explicitly Jewish, where do you find Jewishness in your acting?
Jake: I got to play the Baker in Into the Woods a few years ago. There are some characters who aren’t explicitly Jewish, but you’re like: My version is going to be Jewish, undeniably. I found that there was something helpful, in the humor and pathos of that character, to mine the Yiddishkeit cadence. I found that useful to tap into.
Samuel: A few quick ones to close. What’s something you’re bad at?
Jake: Maintaining a neutral face when there’s nonsense happening around me. [Editor’s note: Jake laughs villainously after saying this]
Samuel: What’s something you’re feeling proud about?
Jake: We moved into a new house a year ago, and we’re filling a house for the first time. I’m very proud of the home my partner and I are creating. It’s a place that I’m eager and proud to invite family and friends into. I’m obsessed with hosting now.
Also, we [did] a special Shabbat pre-show on December 5th. Signature does a Pride Night every run of each show, and so for this Pride Night we partnered with NJB+ and had a big Shabbat, said prayers, and turned the whole evening into a lovely event for the Jewish community. I was excited about that.
Samuel: When did the transition from “house we moved into” to “home” happen?
Jake: We found the perfect dining room table.
Samuel: You can invite any three people to Shabbat dinner. Who are you bringing?
Jake: I’m watching The Great British Bake Off right now, and I’m obsessed with Alison Hammond. She stirs the pot. Then, Kelly Bishop, who was in the original company of A Chorus Line and won a Tony for that. But, she also plays Emily Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, and I just finished her memoir. And, finally, Padma Lakshmi.
Samuel: Last one. Finish the sentence: When Jews of the DMV gather…
Jake: There’s a lot of upward inflection. Everything goes up!
The views and opinions expressed in this blog and on this website are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the organization GatherDC, the GatherDC staff, the GatherDC board, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
