'The Oldest Boy' review: An emotional journey of faith to find the high lama
Sarah Ruhl ("In the Next Room: or The Vibrator Play") explores the quandary when an American mother (Celia Keenan-Bolger, above) and a Tibetan-born husband have a son believed to be the reincarnation of a high Buddhist teacher, in "The Oldest Boy." Credit: T. Charles Erickson
"The Oldest Boy" is a bewitching, ingenious and seriously moving new play by Sarah Ruhl, the much-admired playwright whose work, until her recent "Stage Kiss," tended to wear me down with self-conscious whimsy.
The premise is both improbable and strangely believable, sort of a "Rosemary's Baby" for good people. A modern American mother (Celia Keenan-Bolger in a lovely, extremely sympathetic performance) is home alone with her three-year-old boy when two Tibetan monks arrive to tell her that her son is the reincarnation of a high lama -- in fact, one of their teachers whom they need to raise in their Buddhist monastery in India.
The father (the appealing James Yaegashi) is a Tibetan immigrant whose restaurant is the setting for the parents to fall in love in an enchanting flashback.
The boy is a puppet operated with sticks by three people in director Rebecca Taichman's beautifully stylized yet emotionally forthright production, which, at times, includes Tibetan ritual dancers in an elevated frame.
In two deceptively simple hours, Ruhl ensnares us with particular yet universal questions about belief, cultures, the importance of teachers, the deep emotions in food and the contrary parental need to hold on and let go. All this and charm, too.
WHAT
"The Oldest Boy"
WHERE
Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center Theater
INFO
$77-$87; 212-239-6200; lct.org
BOTTOM LINE
Bewitchingly down-the-parental-rabbit-hole with Tibetan Buddhists.
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