Neil Simon's Schmaltzy 45 Seconds from Broadway; Everett Beekin and Where's My Money? Offer Intriguing Versions of the Stage Jew
I went to see the new Neil Simon play the other night. Oy, vhat an old-feshioned play! Even I dohn' remember vhen dey used to produce plays like dis. Dey's dis character in de show, Mickey Fox (Lewis J. Stadlen), dat talks joost like dis on account he's soopposed to be Jackie Mason, the stend-up comic. He talks like dis all evening. So if this doesn' mek you leff, dohn' go and see da show, because this is about as funny as it gets.
45 Seconds from Broadway is set at the Cafe Edison, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Edison Hotel, also known as "the Polish tea room." The Edison is located almost directly across the street from the Richard Rodgers Theater, where 45 Seconds is running?and that, except for a real live taxicab that rolls across the stage at rise of curtain, is about as close as the play comes to truth. Don't, by the way, underestimate the thrill of seeing a real live taxi roll across a Broadway stage. It's pretty terrific. Certainly, it elicited little squeals of delight from me, and I clapped my fists together in girlish glee at the spectacle of John Lee Beatty's recreation of 46th St. What a wag that boy is!
On a wall of the coffee shop, a poster for David Auburn's play Proof bearing the face of the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh tells us how up-to-the-minute the play is supposed to be. (Leigh only went into the show in September.) It's too bad about the poster. It's conceivable that 45 Seconds from Broadway might have had some charm if it were set 25 or 30 years ago. In a play that took place in 1970, Bernie (Louis Zorich), the gruff-but-kindly proprietor of the coffee shop, and his wife Zelda (Rebecca Schull), might have seemed like the avatars of a sweet, forgotten world?though actually even 1970 might be pushing it. For most of the other characters in the play you'd probably have to go back to about 1964.
They come in two varieties, stereotypical Jews and stereotypical non-Jews. The Jews include Bernie and Zelda (survivors of the camps, thankful for every day they're alive); Mickey and his whiny, worshipful older brother Harry (David Margulies); and a pair of matinee matrons played by Judy Blazer and the usually droll Alix Korey, who so ferociously overplays the notion of shrill vulgarity here that she seems in danger of blowing the roof off the theater. Among the non-Jews are an aspiring young playwright from South Africa (Kevin Carroll), proud but generally upbeat and respectful; a fresh-faced hopeful from the Midwest (Julie Lund) whose failed-actress mother still remembers Bernie and Zelda's kindness from 20 years ago; a West End producer who wants Mickey to come to London in a show (he just adores New York and can't seem to get enough of either Mickey or Jews); a plus-size blues singer (Lynda Gravatt) full of yo'-mama wisdom and attitude; and an old-money husband and wife (Bill Moor and Marian Seldes), the former of whom never speaks, while the latter suffers from a form of dementia that leads her to think herself always either at a cotillion or in a bar on the piccola marina. In most contemporary plays you would expect such characters to be angrier or better medicated.
Simon used to write characters. Now apparently he's reduced to constructing plays around real-life celebrities. They're not as interesting as real-life taxicabs. At any rate, his sanitized version of Jackie Mason isn't. Simon seems to have missed the point about what makes Mason funny, which is the same thing that makes him interesting. It's what folks who use 20-dollar words call cognitive dissonance. Mason says mean, hostile things in that cute, cuddly voice. They're objectionable things that happen to be true, and because he says them in the funny voice, they're more surprising and less objectionable than they might otherwise be. Simon's Mickey Fox only says cute, cuddly things so there's no dissonance, and not a whole lot that you could call cognitive, either.
There's no dissonance anywhere in the play, in fact. How you long for some dissonance?an unkind word, a barbed retort. But the play is all smarmy, showbiz warmth and heart. Everybody's jovial and well-meaning, full of wide-eyed appreciation of everyone else. The oldsters want to help the youngsters and the non-Jews want nothing more than to stand around contemplating the phenomenon of the cheese blintz. Conflict here?which rears its head only once, in the specter of Harry's untalented son, a lawyer who wants to be a comedian like his famous uncle, and whom Harry wants Mickey to take under his wing?is expressed entirely in terms of trips to the bathroom. (A late plot twist involving the sale of the coffee shop announces itself so clearly as a contrivance that poor Mr. Zorich seems embarrassed even performing it.) And everybody wins. Little Miss Hopeful gets a part, the South African writes a good play (about Mickey, of all people!) and hooks up with the producer, and it seems there will even be a part for the untalented nephew, whom Mickey has been coaching to do passable imitations of himself. Even Ms. Seldes' psychopharmacologist comes through in the end.
45 Seconds from Broadway, through Feb. 24 at the Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 W. 46th St. (betw. 8th Ave. & B'way), 307-4100.
Of course, Jackie Mason's self-invented persona is a device, a construct built on idea of out-caricaturing a caricature. If you exaggerate a stereotype, you can sometimes discredit it and disarm it. (Mason is fond of pointing out to his audiences that nobody really talks the way he does, a joke that Simon appropriates and defangs.) Mason's stage-self, which may be no different by now from his real self, is really a hybrid made up of two very different and historically antithetical versions of the stage Jew, old and new. The Elizabethan stage Jew was a comic figure?part miser, part Satan (himself a comic character in medieval drama). His darker counterpart dates from 1741, when an actor named Charles Macklin insisted on performing Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in place of a popular Restoration version of the play and reinvented the role of Shylock. Macklin shocked audiences (and his fellow cast members) by playing the character as a realistic villain rather than a pantomime devil or a pantalone. In doing so, Macklin invented a new sort of stage Jew who partly survives today. Played straight?and you can see this in any decent production of the play, even something as archly perverse as the recent Trevor Nunn Royal National Theater version that aired on Masterpiece Theater in October?whether villain or tragic hero, Shylock is the embodiment of ugly, objectionable truth. Both in his person and his pronouncements, he represents the harsh realities that the world at large would really rather have remain hidden (like the Jews themselves) or at least not be made explicit?the need for money, for instance, and society's hypocrisy in refusing to acknowledge that need.
Take from Shylock the element of usury, though?an aspect of the character that Shakespeare seems not to have been all that interested in anyway?and what you have is essentially the figure of the angry, truth-telling Jew. He's a tragic figure, too clear-eyed and more candid than is healthy, a spirit of resentment and retribution with no retributive powers, a sort of non-Fury. That's the interesting side of Jackie Mason?the subtext that Simon, perhaps understandably, purged from his play.
Off-Broadway audiences are encountering two intriguing versions of the stage Jew, just now?the embittered older sister played by Robin Bartlett in the first act of Richard Greenberg's ambitious but ultimately unfulfilling family saga Everett Beekin, and the demonic matrimonial lawyer played by David Deblinger in the last half of John Patrick Shanley's Where's My Money? Both characters are reality-mongers of the harshest variety, both endowed with a decidedly Jewish cast of mind, and both are portrayed with a loving attention to ethnic mannerism that keeps threatening to topple over into caricature but never does. Bartlett and Deblinger are engaging in a sort of actorly brinksmanship, a heightened realism that stops short of passing judgment on the characters or offering editorial commentary.
Lesser actors might have tried to distance themselves from these roles. Bartlett and Deblinger are both playing highly unpleasant people. Greenberg's Sophie is a monster of inflected irony and overinterpretation, the sort of woman for whom schadenfreude is the breath of life, who can read negativity into the most neutral statement and detects slights wherever she looks. (She's a literary descendant of the martyred mother in Neil Simon's autobiographical Broadway Bound.) Shanley's Sidney is a misogynist of epic proportions. He sees infidelity in marriage as a moral imperative and makes his perverse case for it with Talmudic thoroughness. (He's a little like Milton's Satan or the Vice figure in Medieval drama?a poet of perversity, irresistible but wrong.)
Actually, both characters have a warped perspective that becomes the most entertaining and compelling thing in the play. But Shanley isn't really interested in Sidney's Jewishness so much as he is in the discrepancy between the man Sidney presents himself to be and the one we see in the next scene confronting his wife. It's nothing so banal as strong-versus-weak, just that the marriage and the wife are both more interesting and complex than Sidney makes them out to be. They're worthy (in every sense) of his rhetoric and the quality of his thought. As always, Shanley is interested in the pathology of heterosexual guilt, which he explores here in a sort of Schnitzlerian rondeau that substitutes spiritual malaise for the venereal disease that characters in La Ronde pass on to each other. Matrimony itself, rather than promiscuity, is the incubator here.
Where's My Money? doesn't pretend to be any more than a shaggy-ghost story. Shanley's characters are literally haunted by the shades of the people they fear they've wronged. Everett Beekin is a ghost story too, in a way. Greenberg is attempting a reverse-angle version of something he did in an earlier play, Three Days of Rain. There three actors portrayed six characters, a generation apart: first the children, then their parents. Everett Beekin leaps forward in time, showing us a Jewish American family in 1940s New York in Act I and some of their descendants in Southern California in Act II. Again, all the actors play different roles in each act, but Everett Beekin doesn't rely on the same one-to-one correspondence between characters and their genetic forebears. Instead, Greenberg seems to want us to draw connections between the two characters played respectively by each actor as archetypes. The Jewish characters in the first half of Everett Beekin are all stereotypes?the operatic mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), the wartime wife (Bebe Neuwirth), the brisket-loving husband, the romantic youngest sister (Jennifer Carpenter), brilliant, beautiful, talented and offered an escape through marriage to a gentile (Kevin Isola.)
He's examining stock characters from life, though, asking us to view them as the beneficiaries of a literary inheritance. Except that they're non-beneficiaries or it's a non-inheritance. This is a play about assimilation and its discontents. Greenberg wants us to think about what this or that stereotype of Jewish family history has become?just as he wants us to demonstrate that the easygoing gentile for whom success and achievement come effortlessly, embodied in the WASP of the title, a character we never see, who turns out never to have existed, is a fantasy as much a part of Jewish American family mythology as anything else.
It turns out the youngest sister didn't get away after all, but died soon after the scene we witnessed, of a form of cancer that would be curable now. That's the big revelation of Act II. More interesting than either that, though, or seeing her reborn as a perennially restless and bewildered Valley Girl, is what happens to the Robin Bartlett figure, Sophie. Like the other members of the family, she's lost her Jewishness and with it all sense of purpose and identity. Greenberg's point?that rootlessness is a bad thing?may be banal and not an ideal subject for the stage (Everett Beekin would probably make a better novel or movie), but it's interesting that what he's demonstrating on the stage of Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater is essentially what's going on night after night at the Richard Rodgers?the assimilation of the stage Jew by a process that, robbing him of his Jewishness or his anger (they're the same thing), makes him harmless.
Where's My Money?, through Jan. 13 at the Manhattan Theater Club Stage 2 at City Center, 131 W. 55th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 581-1212.
Everett Beekin at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, 150 W. 65th St. (B'way), 239-6200.