On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage CHATTER AND SONG BY STEFAN KANFER ERIC BOGOSIAN has one major distinction: He was in Oliver Stone's worst film, Talk Radio. Anyone who has seen JFK knows just how extraordinary that...
...The spirited revue, That's Life, peers through the picture windows of another kind of suburbia and files an oddly reassuring report...
...It is in America that the last great battle of Judaism will be fought out," predicted Israel Zangwill in 1892...
...They were not so anxious to lose the affiliations of five centuries...
...Jeff, the one seemingly decent guy, alternately sided with his friends and the irritated Indians, depending on the mood of the scene...
...The rest of the time the actor/playwright has starred in abrasive one-man shows of his own devising, like Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll...
...This bit of exotica was a Hollywood publicist, working for the local boy who made good, Pony (Zak Orth...
...But the Indians, too, were written without the slightest insight...
...Well, because the playwright wanted it so...
...They can worship as they please—and they visit a synagogue only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, if then...
...Like the seraph in the Temple of the Lord it covers its face with two of its wings...
...Bogosian kept himself offstage in his latest effort, sub Urbia, but that was his only charitable act...
...One routine imagines Moses in suburbia "talking to a burning shrub and parting the cars in the parking lot...
...In their conversation, their diets, even their temples they have paid for their prosperity with their identity...
...The conflict, which began in his time, concerns Tradition vs...
...The rock star had impulsively dropped by en route to his next gig...
...One of them says that in his temple an ashtray is kept near the Torah so that those who pray can continue to smoke...
...Some of his findings were caustic...
...Pharmacopoeia, bounced off the walls like a chimpanzee in heat, until he abruptly decided to be tender and amorous with Bee-Bee...
...Several numbers are closer to the Cat-skills than to Commentary...
...In the end she decides that she would rather pass by than pass through as a shiksa...
...of course she fell for him immediately...
...an entire section was given over to jokes revealing the American predicament: "A number of Jews debate over whose synagogue is the most progressive...
...In other words, he concluded that under the cover of compromise, put-downs and self-conscious wisecracks, American Jews still clung to special rites and ethical beliefs, still valued learning, still regarded their families as the center of their lives, just as their fathers and mothers did in the Old World...
...According to their reasoning, the Jews who came here for liberty have been undone by it...
...The gang of aimless post-adolescents were straight out of Rebel Without a Cause, a movie that was old when the cast was newborn...
...But the situation is not that simple...
...He was wiser than he knew...
...Anyone who has seen JFK knows just how extraordinary that achievement is...
...frequently...
...There are those who think the struggle for the Jewish soul is about over in the U.S...
...As for the females, soon or late they succumbed to the entreaties of their pursuers...
...This revue is hardly in a league with the dramas...
...Any other desires were satisfied by purchases from the neighboring 7-Eleven store, run by two Indian immigrants, Norman (Firdous E. Bamji) and his sister Pakeeza (Samia Shoaib...
...Yet he was discerning enough to guess what Erica read (Vanity Fair), as well as the nuances of her Bel-Air lifestyle...
...and it has produced works by such young playwrights as Donald Margulies (Sight Unseen) and Susan Sandler (Crossing Delancey...
...My grandpa's always plastered, My grandma pushes tea...
...Mama, I Want to Sit Downstairs" concerns a young girl's confusion: She embraced Judaism, but was haunted by the segregation of men and women in her Orthodox temple...
...Bogosian, who has trouble creating characters that possess so much as a nodding acquaintance with reality, served up a festival of inconsistencies...
...And that also was desecrated by the end, pocked with dents, littered with cigarette butts, potato chips and crushed beer cans...
...Goodness, gracious, that's why I'm a mess...
...That's Life is the latest effort of the Jewish Repertory Theater...
...They have been free to wed whomever they want—and they have opted for inter-marriage...
...Modernity, and more than a hundred years later it is still with us...
...The doctor was not wholly pessimistic...
...Tim, an Air Force reject, everlastingly mouthed his moronic biases against "Jews and lousy faggots who do benefits for starving niggers in Somalia...
...Eleven composers and lyricists contributed to the proceedings—a clear case of too many kuchers, one would think...
...Some songs directly address the subject...
...Others run through such items as "Rhinoplasty," written and sung by Stern, who seems on familiar terms with nasal abbreviation...
...Erica, who appeared to have more than a passing acquaintance with silicone, even retired to a nearby park with Tim...
...Nonetheless, beneath its twinkling surface lies the same Jewish-American dilemma, unchanged after all these years, and encapsulated in my favorite Yiddish proverb: Es iz veyech der bet ober shver tsu shlofn...
...After More Than 5,700 Years" speaks of ineradicable Jewish history...
...The bed is soft, but it's hard to sleep...
...What the audience saw and heard was a group of youths with a little money and too much time to kill...
...This summer, theatergoers can see the latest version of Zangwill's battle (along with some Reikian humor) at the Playhouse 91, a jewel box set in the middle of Yuppieville...
...It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed...
...Buff, who must have ingested every hallucinatory drug in the U.S...
...Instead it had Director Robert Falls, whose heavy fingers were evident in everything but Derek McLane's inventive set...
...My sister wears a mustache, My brother wears a dress...
...Conflict, the lifeblood of any drama, was provided by Norman and Pakeeza quite sensibly objecting to all the noise and filth created by these suburbanites...
...Another observes that "We're all mensches/but here in the trenches/it's hard to be a patriarch today...
...Yet Director-Choreographer Helen Butleroff unites the numbers into a whole...
...Bogosian, who had obviously been studying his creative writing manuals, armed the Indians with a pistol, and you may be sure that although it never went off, the weapon was waved about whenever the tension lagged—i.e...
...The second man says, 'We are much more progressive...
...Indeed, by the late '50s the idea of rebellious youth had become such a bromide that Stephen Sondheim kidded the convention in West Side Story...
...On the receiving end were two locals, the recovering substance abuser Bee-Bee (Wendy Hoopes) and the adrenal Sooze (Martha Plimpton), plus a glamorous visitor, Erica (Babette Renee Props...
...The organization has effectively mounted plays by the likes of Neil Simon and Arthur Miller...
...Norman, for example, spoke of his life in the old country where he and his family had a retinue of servants...
...Thirty years ago psychiatrist Theodor Reik made a study of Jewish wit...
...In between threats, the youths, male and female, presented their autobiographies...
...the tunes and topics have a tongue-and-groove fit...
...All except one of the 19 skits are set to melodies sung by a cast of five: Robert Michael Baker, David Beach, Lisa Rochelle, Cheryl Stern, and Steve Sterner...
...Fathers and Sons" discusses the indefinable warmth of a child singing a Yiddish song that his grandfather once sang to his little boy...
...He's psychologic'ly disturbed...
...Tim (Tim Guinee), Buff (Steve Zahn) and Jeff (Josh Hamilton) occupied the street corner of an unnamed suburb and noisily advertised their sexual appetites...
...On Yom Kippur we serve ham sandwiches.' The third Jew claims, 'We are so progressive that we are closed on the High Holy Days.'" As for assimilation: "Little Use asks hermother, 'Mommy, do the gentiles have Christmas trees too?'" Reik found that such humor "acts to bring relaxation in the ardor of battle," the very skirmish that Zangwill described...
...The drama, a sophomoric attempt to reveal America's rotten underside, was the third entry in "A Festival of New American Plays" at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center, where the sightlines and the acoustics are, unfortunately, superb...
...and "I Can Pass," a play on words featuring the temptations of country club life for a pretty housewife (Stern again...
...Not one moment of this was believable or original...
...Whereupon the "boy" explained himself: My father is a bastard, My ma's an S.O.B...
...Why, then, had he dropped so precipitously in class and become a low-rent immigrant shopkeeper...
...The graffiti printed on the pages of the script, however, were far more insulting to the onlookers...
...All were suffering from alienation, a social disease involving inadequate parents in collaboration with that favorite villain of the bankrupt playwright: society...
...sub Urbia (the spelling was the production's only unorthodox component) could have used such a light touch...
...They have had the liberty to distinguish themselves in every profession—and they have become indistinguishable from their gentile neighbors...
...Jewish wit," he went on, "hides as much as it discloses...
...When a cop confronted a group of adolescents, they chanted: Officer Krupke, you are really a square: This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care...
...Pony was ingratiating enough, but his display of guitar playing and singing would not have earned him a guest shot on Beavis and Butthead...
...But even the most superficial material is enlivened by the vigorous and diverting ensemble...
Vol. 77 • August 1994 • No. 8
