A play about Spinoza is a curtain-raiser for Lantern Theater

'Y ou don't often think of the words philosophy and festival as going together. But why not? Ideas are fun - they're more fun, more engrossing, the bigger they are. That's why we like big ideas around here."

That's Charles McMahon, artistic director of the Lantern Theater. He's explaining why Lantern is offering a Fall Philosophy Festival: Theater and the Age of Reason, Oct. 21-22. And the first play of Lantern's 2011-2012 season concerns that big thinker Baruch Spinoza.

New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, by David Ives, runs through Nov. 6 (an extended run; see below). It tells of how 23-year-old Spinoza was interrogated and expelled by Amsterdam's Jewish community for his radical ideas. One of history's boldest thinkers lived out his short life - he was dead at 44 - as a quiet scholar and a grinder of glass lenses.

Spinoza was born into a Portuguese Sephardic community newly arrived in Amsterdam, which had recently broken with the Catholic Church. Amsterdam proclaimed itself a modern, tolerant state, but the paranoid politics of the renegade Netherlands, with its small army and flat, all-but-indefensible borders, intervened. The Jewish community, still insecure in its new home, realized its welcome was shaky. As McMahon puts it, "The authorities were on guard against radicalism, no matter what the religion."

Spinoza is considered a father of the Enlightenment, a likely hub for the fall festival. (He's also a star in what is becoming a big season for Jewish-themed theater in Philadelphia.) Lectures and panel discussions will mull Spinoza's thinking, the Jewish experience in Europe, and court proceedings as theater. For a final word, on Oct. 23, Enlightenment historian Jonathan Israel will explore "How Spinoza Made America Possible." A list of events appears at www.lanterntheater.org.

So far, both play and festival appear to be huge hits. Even before Wednesday's opening night, seven shows were sold out, and 60 percent of all tickets had been sold prior to previews. Originally slated to end its run Oct. 30, the show has been extended to Nov. 6.

"It's the largest presale in the 18-year history of Lantern Theater," says Megan Wendell of Canary Promotions, the company's marketers. Who knew folks around here were so hot for big ideas?

"What's great about this play is that there's so much at stake," McMahon says. "Amsterdam is supposed to be a model of an open society. But as Spinoza's ideas spread, the government puts pressure on the Jewish community to do something about him."

"It's not often that so many different social, intellectual, political, and religious forces come into play, all at once, at one time, in one place," says playwright Ives, speaking by phone from New York. "If that doesn't make for great theater, what would?"

The surprise is that it does make for a tense, witty, trenchant play. McMahon says, "You wouldn't think that arguments about religion and philosophy would make for good theater, but David Ives has turned it into a crackling courtroom drama."

"I basically saw it as my job to shuffle Inherit the Wind, The Caine Mutiny, and The Crucible, and mix well with the meaning of life, and that's what you get," says Ives with a chuckle. "A trial is self-dramatizing, so all I had to do is get the right people in the room."

As shown in the play, Spinoza's rabbi, Saul Levi Morteira, is by turns admirer and inquisitor, reluctant yet determined. "What I was drawn to," says Ives, "is how beloved Spinoza was in the community, by everyone who met him. This is a man so friendly, open, guileless, yet denounced with harsh judgment and forced to go into exile and leave behind everything he had. It was an extraordinarily tragic situation from which there can be no good outcome."

Despite the weight of the proceedings, Ives' Spinoza is sparkling, intense, clearly taking immense pleasure in arguing about God and reality.

Sam Henderson, who plays Spinoza, calls him "a man who speaks quickly and with precision. He lays out his terms and is careful to reason step by step."

Does he like Spinoza? "Yes - an actor who didn't find some point of empathy with his character would be in a lot of trouble."

"For me, Spinoza is not the main character," says Ives. "The community around him is, because they have the problem. He has the truth, the nettle in their midst, but he is their problem. My mental image of the play is of a wheel in constant motion around this young man."

The historical Spinoza may not have questioned God's existence, but he did insist on a physical God in a physical universe, a God embodied in the laws of that universe. Spinoza denied the immortality of the soul, and he also denied that modern Jews were bound by the Torah. Many of his ideas anticipated the rise of rationalistic and scientific thinking in the centuries to come.

Hmm . . . God and the universe? Politics? Radicalism and tolerance? It's almost as if the play is talking about . . . 2011.

"Oh, of course the political situation has applications to right now," Ives says. "It exposes the limitations of any open society. The fact of politics often limits actual tolerance, despite best intentions."

So we have a Fall Philosophy Festival in Philadelphia, selling tickets like mad. How did this idea even get started? McMahon says that he, associate artistic director Kathryn MacMillan, and colleagues "have these fantastic discussions about the big ideas involved in the plays we do. And one day we just said, 'Why don't we make the ideas the focus next year?' "

What to call the festival? Before they settled on the alliterative Fall Philosophy Festival, a certain wonderful yet unfortunate name surfaced.

"For a brief moment, we jokingly, only jokingly, thought of it, but we let it go just as fast," McMahon says with a laugh.

Too bad. It would have been fun to attend Spinozalooza .

Watch Sam Henderson play Spinoza in rehearsal at www.philly.com/spinozaEndText