REVIEWS ...
Saturday, June 4, 2005
Well-crafted look at truth, betrayal
By Eileen Spiegler
espiegler@herald.com
Jules Feiffer's A Bad Friend, set against the chilly political climate of the 1950s, chronicles the search for truth and the many betrayals it engenders in one Brooklyn family.
In his spare, moving play at GableStage, Feiffer - a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist as well as playwright - offers a civics lesson in how alterable truth is, depending on one's perspective and agenda. That's hardly a news flash, but told against the microcosm of damage done to four little people (to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca), it becomes especially powerful.
At the center of the maelstrom is Rose, a teenager grappling with perplexing coming-of-age questions. The stage is set, literally, to leave no doubt about the other pressures bearing on Rose: Grainy photos of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish couple whose execution as spies for the Soviets remains controversial; of longtime FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a chief architect of the government's anti-Communist crusade; and newspaper clippings of testimony before the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) are the backdrop.
The most realized of the characters, Rose, is played by Lauren Feldman, who captures the fierce tenderness and simultaneous resentment she feels for her family of Jewish "progressives" - a code word for Communists - whose passion for politics blinds them to their daughter's yearning for their attention.
"You think it's easy being the only one in this family not in love with Stalin?" Rose asks her parents, Naomi (Tracey Moore) and Shelly (Avi Hoffman), who express the tension of those caught in the dawning realization that the Stalin they are sacrificing their lives to defend is as much an agent of their destruction as the FBI and HUAC. The play's pivotal moment comes when Shelly voices his doubt, and a shaken Naomi demands he "take it back." Too afraid of the truth, he does.
Rose finds solace in a father figure she meets on the Brooklyn Esplanade. Played with effective understatement by Kevin Reilley, the mysterious Emil gives Rose a place to grow, but has little else to do and is vague - oddly so, since Feiffer has said he is based on a real person. Feiffer, in fact, loosely based the story on his own memories of growing up in the '50s and his relationship with his sometimes overbearing, politically active sister.
Director Joseph Adler brings out the best in all the actors - Nick Velkov has fun with a small role as the FBI agent who dogs Rose, preying on her vulnerability and using false friendliness to chip away (a little) at her resolve not to reveal family secrets. Andy Quiroga is Naomi's brother, Morty, a Hollywood screenwriter who berates Rose for her lack of commitment to the cause and for befriending strangers, though he ends up doing the real damage.
The action is in a series of short scenes that emphasize the dialogue, often punctuated by newsreels on a screen. If there's any weakness in the play, it's in the ending, which needs more transition and feels a little tacked-on and melodramatic, in light of how crafted what came before it is.
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Seeing Red
Growing up in the glare of communism
By Octavio Roca
Jules Feiffer's memory play about Brooklyn in the Fifties resounds as a cautionary tale for the United States in the 21st Century. Now at GableStage in a terrific production directed by Joseph Adler, A Bad Friend is ambitious and intimate, a provocative series of family snapshots that evokes the history of an era. It's about McCarthyism, Hollywood's blacklist, lost illusions, and regaining hope. It's about a young girl's coming of age and perhaps about a nation losing its way.
We're often told this decade was a time of innocence, but also one of rampant political treachery. The Fifties should have been an optimistic period, America fresh from the victory of World War II, but the specter of communism threatened the world anew. Blacklists were drawn up, careers were destroyed, and paranoia filled the air. It was an age of uncertainty for Naomi and Shelly, two old card-carrying commies living in Brooklyn with their teenage daughter Rose. When the play begins, Rose's Uncle Morty, a lefty who sold out and went to Hollywood, is visiting. Not too far from the periphery of the teenager's world are two enigmatic figures, a kindly old painter named Emil and a young, smooth operator named Fallon who probably works for the FBI. This is all well-traveled territory, but the playwright - a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author of Carnal Knowledge - is up to more than a nostalgic retread. And the performances are persuasive.
The ensemble as a whole is never less than captivating. Alexander Okun's sprawling fantasy of a set anchors the action near the Brooklyn Bridge while trumpeting the era's contradictions with huge photos of Stalin, McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, Nixon, and Eisenhower.
True, A Bad Friend is a tad overwritten. For example, Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy is mentioned and its plot is summarized not once or twice, but three times - when Rose wants to discuss it with Emil after receiving the book, again when she recants the story as if it were real political gossip to the mysterious Fallon, and again by Fallon when he calls Rose a bad friend. One reference would have been enough. An epilogue that suddenly catapults the action from 1953 to 1973 likewise loses steam by repeating itself; there is a genuinely moving memorial service for one of the characters, followed by an unnecessary Academy Award acceptance speech by another for a movie called The Bad Friend. Nonetheless the play's otherwise effective structure as a sequence of very short, pithy scenes at times recalls the serial panels of a Feiffer cartoon and frankly shares the limitations of that popular form. In other words, real pathos is too often missing in this political play, along with any carefully constructed political argument. There are hints of it only once: when Rose comes close to noticing that her parents' Marxist-Leninist blind faith in the materialist forces of history actually entails a disregard for the ineffable exuberance of human freedom.
Then again maybe these are quibbles, and perhaps a sophisticated political argument is the furthest thing one might expect from any of Feiffer's characters. Give the playwright credit for not once letting A Bad Friend degenerate into a facile exercise in left-wing nostalgia. Forget the depressing realities of the McCarthy era. In truth, to have been blindly in love with Stalin and the Soviet Union in 1953 is, to put it kindly, as benighted as to have fallen for Hitler and his Third Reich in 1943. Naomi and Shelly, Rose's Stalinist parents, are not profound political thinkers nor are they dangerous people. This makes their daughter's unlikely rebellion that much more touching. "I've marched with my mother more times than I've gone to the movies with her," says Rose in an aside that would ring painfully true no matter what the politics of Naomi's marches. At least as moving and also very funny is Rose's mortal fear of being nothing more than a liberal - an infantile ideological disease according to her communist parents. "A liberal is a person who has his feet firmly planted in midair," her father tells her. Her mother tells her worse.
Repeating here what Rose actually does, as well as the surprising betrayals of almost everyone else, would require a spoiler alert. Suffice to say that no one in A Bad Friend turns out to be what we expect. But what matters most is the subtle and extremely valuable lesson of Feiffer's play: Political blindness should not be illegal. In a free country, everyone has the right to an opinion. Sometimes those you least expect actually have a point.
Indeed, the extreme American left never has been powerful or dangerous; it has remained on the fringe, never more so than now. The extreme American right, on the other hand, is dangerously close to power, to playing on a people's fears and hatreds, narrowly redefining patriotism as evangelical zeal in full flower, ruthlessly banishing responsible dissent, and challenging every dissenter's patriotism in ways that make McCarthy's despicable antics of the Fifties seem tame in 2005.
"Feiffer's play reminds us that some viruses never die," writes Pete Hamill in his program notes for A Bad Friend. "They need only genuine fear to allow them to rise again with renewed force. A bullying form of patriotism is too often the norm. Many of us who love this country are filled with anguish about the easy way in which its great virtues are being thrown away. Many of us remember the Fifties. Remember, Feiffer urges us. Remember."
A Bad Friend is certainly a memory play, but more important, Feiffer encourages us to remember the future. It's good advice.
