By Itai Erdal, Anita Rochon, and Maiko Yamamoto. Directed by Anita Rochon and Maiko Yamamoto. An Elbow Theatre production, presented by the Chutzpah Festival. At the Jewish Community Centre on Saturday, March 5. Continues until March 13

Sometimes a light touch is a good thing: in his new show, A Very Narrow Bridge, performer Itai Erdal’s presence is pleasingly understated. But sometimes you want artists to use a firmer hand: Erdal shares the writing credits on this piece with codirectors Anita Rochon and Maiko Yamamoto, and the script they’ve come up with is so quiet and vague that it almost doesn’t exist. 

For Erdal, A Very Narrow Bridge is autobiographical. In the play’s central action, he obtains a get, a divorce, from his wife and former childhood sweetheart. The central subject of the piece is Erdal’s discomfort, as a secular Jew, with the incursions of religion into the operations of the state of Israel: to obtain his divorce, he has to endure a four-hour grilling from a rabbinical court; religious leaders question him about his identity and intentions before engaging in an elaborate ritual that involves writing out the get on a piece of leather. In A Very Narrow Bridge, the most potent statement is the presence on-stage of Erdal’s younger sister, Talia, who plays her cello throughout the piece. Erdal, who has moved to Canada, worries that, as Talia ventures deeper into a religious life, they will lose the intimacy they once shared.

On paper, this is all quite cool and subtle. But in the theatre, the stakes are so low and the storytelling so nonspecific that nothing really matters. Erdal and his wife have been separated for a long time. That relationship is over; it’s not like love is on the line. Erdal speaks fondly of the hummus in Israel, and he includes a few vivid sensual details—walking barefoot on tiles, the smell of mushrooms in the forest after the first rain—but he also complains so much about religious restrictions and Israeli militarism that leaving Israel doesn’t seem to have been much of a wrench for him. Crucially, the relationship that we see live on-stage lacks detail. Erdal tells us that Talia used to share all of her secrets with him, but we don’t hear any of those secrets. Because we don’t get a concrete sense of the love they shared, it’s hard to empathize with Erdal’s fear of losing it.

Talia is a skilled cellist, but the long solo that she plays about two-thirds of the way through the piece feels more like a musical interlude than a solidly contextualized narrative or emotional progression.

The comic bits in which the rabbis are played by Patti Allan, Anton Lipovetsky, and Tom Pickett are effectively absurd.

I wanted more.