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Margulies’s ‘Brooklyn Boy’ returns to his Jewish roots
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| Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for Eric (Charles Kartali), left, who reconnects with boyhood buddy Ira (Noah Budin) during a visit to the old neighborhood.
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Reviewed by: FRAN HELLER Contributing Writer
Call it a midlife identity crisis.
With “Brooklyn Boy,” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies (“Dinner with Friends”) returns to his Jewish roots.
Like Alfred Uhry (“The Last Night of Ballyhoo”), David Mamet (“The Old Neighborhood”), and the late Herb Gardner (“Conversations with My Father”), Margulies is yet another Jewish playwright who looks homeward at middle age.
The play, which premièred in New York in 2005, is a JCC production at Tri-C East Performing Arts Center through March 9.
“Brooklyn Boy” is about a successful novelist who returns home to deal with his difficult father, who is dying. Episodic in structure and somewhat predictable in outcome, the comedy/drama is not a great play. What makes it so satisfying is Margulies’s rich characterizations and a razor-sharp, naturalistic dialogue dipped in humor and pain.
The family in “Brooklyn Boy” could be yours or mine.
In the New York production I saw, the play’s structural weaknesses were glaringly obvious. In the JCC production, director Brian Zoldessy brilliantly stitches the loosely knit scenes together in a more coherent flow.
Zoldessy has found a gifted actor in Charles Kartali, whose sublime performance as the melancholy, sensitive writer Eric Weiss rivals that of Adam Arkin, who played the lead on Broadway. Kartali, who remains on stage throughout the two-act play, infuses his character with a humanity that is achingly real.
Envy and resentment are the corrosive evils consuming the people in Eric’s life. Belittling Eric makes his insecure father feel more powerful. Eric’s wife, a failed writer, resents her husband’s success. A chance reunion with a childhood friend is bittersweet. Hollywood rejects Eric’s screenplay, and an awestruck college student who loves Eric’s books tells him that fiction is dead and film is where it’s at.
Through it all, Eric remains stoic, but there is no mistaking the light that goes out of his eyes with each rejection.
Each of six episodes deals with a chapter from Eric’s life. The first takes place in a hospital room, where Eric comes to visit his terminally ill father, Manny Weiss (Bernard Canepari). Eric’s latest novel, Brooklyn Boy, has become a bestseller. The son yearns for approval, but his emotionally abusive father withholds praise.
Canepari as Manny and Kartali as Eric navigate the dysfunctional terrain of father and son in ways that are both funny and tragic. Eric has dedicated his book to his mother and father, but Manny is miffed that their actual names were not included.
When Eric tells his father his novel is #11 on the best-seller list, Manny responds, “I thought it only went to 10.” New Yorker critic John Lahr rightly describes the tyrannical Manny as a “psychological terrorist.”
Eric doesn’t fare any better with his non-Jewish, soon-to-be-ex wife. Dawn Youngs simmers with jealousy as the competitive and self-absorbed wife Nina, who is barren physically (she can’t have children) and imaginatively (she hasn’t had a story published in six years).
Noah Budin is outstanding as the boyhood friend Ira Zimmer, who stays stuck in the family deli while Eric has moved on. Eric saw a way to escape Brooklyn while Ira remained, and he resents Eric for it.
Hollywood buys the movie rights to Eric’s book, but the Jewish producer rejects the screenplay Eric has written as “too Jewish.” Maryann Elder is riotously funny as spastic producer Melanie Fine, but the character she portrays is more caricature than real.
Lanky, blond movie idol Tyler Shaw (Ron Cuirle) has been tapped to play the novel’s protagonist in the film version, seemingly against type. In one of the most touching scenes, Tyler and Eric read from Eric’s script, causing the author to burst into tears.
Winsome Jane Conway is the awestruck Alison, whom Eric invites to his hotel room. Watching a middle-aged man awkwardly trying to connect with an idolizing college girl half his age is comical and sad.
Ben Needham’s fabulous circular turntable set suggests a wheel in which each spoke becomes a scene from Eric’s life. As the wheel turns, the principals remain on stage, effectively linking what follows with what came before.
Lighting wizard Trad A Burns draws shards of sunlight that convert a hospital room and an apartment into prison-like settings for Eric. Stan Kozak’s sound effects and Cherie Stebner’s costumes complete the peerless production.
In an interview in American Theatre magazine some years ago, Margulies bristled at being labeled a Jewish playwright. “Brooklyn Boy” has Jewish written all over it. “Marvelous,” murmured the woman sitting behind me at the play’s end. I agree.
WHAT: “Brooklyn Boy”
WHERE: Tri-C Eastern Campus Performing Arts Center.
TICKETS: 800-766-6048,
www.tickets.com or www.clevejcc.org.
Post-performance discussions after every Sunday matinee.
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