REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Brooklyn Boy drolly disses the fame game
A novelist finds that success doesn't spell happiness in GableStage's terrific season opener.
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Eric Weiss is sitting on top of the world.
After years of a novelist's solitary toil, he has hit the best-seller jackpot with the autobiographically inspired Brooklyn Boy. He's doing a book tour, then heading west to go over his screenplay. But success, he's discovering a little more every day, is no guarantee of happiness.
Brooklyn Boy, which is also the title of this funny and rueful play by Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies, was on Broadway last season. Now director Joseph Adler is kicking off his GableStage lineup with it, in a richly acted and beautifully realized production.
Bruce Miller gets the plum role of Weiss and plays it with deft restraint. Having turned his back on his Jewish Brooklyn past (except as fodder for his breakthrough book), Eric is a man whose easy charm masks long-repressed inner turmoil. Visiting his dying father Manny (Howard Elfman), a shoe salesman driven to undercut his brainy son's accomplishments, middle-aged Eric quickly devolves into the wounded kid he has worked so hard to suppress.
In each scene, Miller knows just when to relax the tension on Eric's self-control, so that pain plays across his face and colors his voice like mournful music. It's an intricate performance, one underscored by the melancholy jazz that sound designer Matt Corey uses to bridge the play's scenes.
Each brings Eric a different sparring partner. After the meltdown with Manny, he runs into Ira Zimmer (the warmly funny Michael H. Small), who once was one of his best friends. Ira is now happily married, Orthodox, a dad. He is, we quickly see, everything that Eric has rejected. Well, not everything: Eric has put a thinly disguised version of him in Brooklyn Boy.
Going to pick up things at his old place, Eric revisits the disintegration of his marriage. Nina (Bridget Connors) has come undone after years of her own failure as a writer and a would-be mother. Miller and Connors invest the wrenching scene with tension, raw emotion and, clearly, the vestiges of love.
The second act of Brooklyn Boy is set mostly in Los Angeles, the land that devours writers. Eric's first encounter is with the sexy blonde Alison (Beth McIntosh), a motor-mouthed groupie wannabe he has picked up at his bookstore reading. Their clash-of-generations scene is hilarious, till it suddenly shifts into an awkward disconnect.
Eric's movie studio visit revisits many a cliché - the manic producer (Lacy Carter) who loves his screenplay but suggests he make his characters less Jewish; the idiotic TV actor (Nicholas Velkov) who's ready to get a perm (he "enters" his characters through their hair) so he can star in Brooklyn Boy: The Movie.
Yet here, too, Margulies and director Adler subvert the comedy so that the scene ends in tears. Though it is laced with laughs, Brooklyn Boy mainly demonstrates that you can go home again. But it will probably hurt like hell.
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
Warmer tone brings success to Brooklyn Boy
By Jack Zink, Theater Writer
Rediscovery is sometimes more important than the first sighting. That's what is happening at the GableStage, where director Joseph Adler and an animated cast bring warmth as well as conflict to Brooklyn Boy.
The Pulitzer Prize is usually invoked with every mention of playwright Donald Margulies' name, but it wasn't for this play, which ran a mere six weeks on Broadway last spring. It's hardly a classic, and seemed cold and at times off-putting there. But the GableStage introduces gentler rhythms to accompany this production's warmer tone, and the script responds eagerly.
Bruce Miller is Eric Weiss, a self-professed Jewish refugee of Brooklyn who has slaved through publishing's underworld to finally surface with a best-selling novel. It's autobiographical, wouldn't you know, exposing thinly disguised versions of family and friends along the way.
The contents will tend to poison what's left of the past, but that's not the main problem. Eric's present is already polluted, so that his sudden fame only seems to enhance his frustration and isolation.
Eric's dad Manny (Howard Elfman) is in the hospital, dying of prostate cancer, envious of his son's success and ashamed of his own humble achievements. But neither parent nor child seem able to comprehend the nature of their discord.
Eric's soon to be ex-wife Nina (Bridget Connors) is an aspiring writer whose self-esteem is hopelessly battered by Eric's triumph as well as his narcissism.
Former freewheeling high school chum Ira (Michael H. Small) has returned to Jewish orthodoxy and tries to coax, then berate, his big-shot estranged pal into embracing their roots.
Beth McIntosh finds unexpected depth in the role of an airheaded wannabe one-night stand. Same goes for Nicholas Velkov as a vacuous movie sensation who hopes to attain legitimacy in a film adaptation of Eric's book. But first, producer-type Melanie (Lacy Carter) tells Eric his screenplay needs to be less ethnic than the best-selling book.
Eric smells sellout but can't see clearly over the chip on his own shoulder; the introverted, anti-social egoist has by this time endured a marathon of disappointment. The title role isn't a particularly likable character, and Miller's attempts to file down the sharpest edges turn pent-up anger to petulance. It works well enough; the ensemble around him is what makes the play breathe as well as it does in Lyle Baskin's well-executed set.
The GableStage's wide space allows Baskin to create three separate playing areas for Brooklyn Boy's many locales, including a hospital ward, New York apartments, Los Angeles hotel rooms and studio offices. Erin Amico's costumes are just so, from Eric's frumpy garb to Alison's valley girl attire to producer Melanie's business suits. Ditto for Matt Corey's sound and Jeff Quinn's lighting. But what's best is the glow Adler has found in the story itself.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Embracing one's roots at heart of entertaining 'Brooklyn Boy'
By Hap Erstein, Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
CORAL GABLES - You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't necessarily take the Brooklyn out of the boy.
Geographic roots and ethnic identity are at the center of Donald Margulies' crafty, thoughtful drama, Brooklyn Boy, about the plight of an emotionally adrift novelist, who has plundered his New York outer borough background and his Jewish heritage for his first bestseller, while turning his back on both.
But with his father dying in Brooklyn's Maimonides Hospital, Eric Weiss pauses from his whirlwind book promotion tour to return home, where he collides headlong with his own past. Like Jonathan Waxman, the abstract artist of Margulies' breakthrough play, Sight Unseen, just as Eric is achieving public success, his private world is dissolving into crisis.
Brooklyn Boy - also the name of Weiss' novel, as well as the imminent major studio movie for which he has been paid well to write the screenplay - opened on Broadway early this year, where it was admired, but deemed insufficiently popular for an open-ended commercial run. GableStage, which gravitates towards the sort of brawny, searing writing that Margulies traffics in, has become one of the first regional companies to produce the play, currently giving it a production with sensitivity and punch.
In a series of two-character encounters, Weiss (a fine, restrained, conflicted Bruce Miller) confronts his formative years, denies his Jewishness, finds no solace in Los Angeles and returns to New York, ready to warily embrace his ethnicity.
The play begins with a hospital encounter between Weiss and his bedridden, but combative father Manny (Howard Elfman), who chides his son for his earlier, largely unread novels and for the literary license he has taken with the details of his life. Then in a lounge at the hospital, Weiss runs into a childhood friend, Ira Zimmer (a wily Michael H. Small), who is antagonistic about Eric's success at the cost of denying his neighborhood and his religion, while also being flattered that he is the inspiration for a minor character in the bestseller.
In the more erratic second act, Margulies tries to counterbalance the downbeat tone of his play so far by drawing Weiss' West Coast encounters in broader comic strokes.
A theme that runs throughout Brooklyn Boy is the difference between reality and fiction. Weiss is always being asked about how autobiographical his book is, and how its events diverge from his experiences. Surely much of this play is inspired by Margulies' life, but what is fact does become irrelevant when there is so much emotional truth.
