Faygele is a Yiddish word meaning “little bird” but it is also used as a derogatory word for gay, equivalent to “faggot”, and it is what his dad unthinkingly calls 13-year-old Ari Freed at his bar mitzvah. Shimmy Braun’s play presents a picture of Ari’s struggle as gay teenager growing up in a family of Ultra-Orthodox Jews from then until his suicide at 18, a bar mitzvah photo on display at the side of the stage, his draped coffin centre.
Faygele is a serious drama that asks for acceptance and compassion, but it starts with a smile as Ari (or his ghost) bounds through the audience to regale them with a catalogue of Yiddish words and expressions before a series of flashbacks with his parents and Rabbi Lev from their synagogue recount his story. This smiling, relaxed Ari is very different from the quivering Ari that Ilan Galkoff also makes him when the living lad comes under stress, but both convincing and with a touch of flirty charisma.
His father, raised secular until his teens when an abusive father adopted Orthodoxy, is a psychologist who believes in aversion therapy, himself conditioned by the way his father treated him. Ben Caplan doesn’t play him as a monster, but his bigotry follows the rulebook, and he fears what others would think. Ari’s mother (Clara Francis) has her hands full with ten other children but finds time to tell him she loves him, and there is a touching moment as she cradles his head on her lap and sings him a lullaby.
It is Andrew Paul’s Rabbi, trying to reconcile his Leviticus rulebook with humanitarian feeling, who gets closest to Ari, a gentle performance of a gentle man, but still leaving Ari despairing. A brief liaison with a gay man with whom Ari exchanges covert glances in synagogue isn’t a solution: 20-years-older Sammy Stein (Yiftach Mizrahi) can’t offer a relationship but will have a further role to play.
There are multiple scenes in the 90-minute single act, David Shields's timber set an elegant background and what could be tedious changes of furniture enlivened by traditional music as action moves from funeral to past confrontations, dramatic moments as when Ari cuts off his payos (his side curls) or the comic enactment of the gobble-gobble fable of the Turkey Prince.
Director Hannah Chissick rearranges too much furniture when the change in Nic Farman’s atmospheric lighting might have been enough, but she concentrates attention on the excellent cast who present characters drawn very much as Ari sees them.