On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage OFF-BROADWAY ORIGINALITY By Stefan Kanfer Historians researching low points in President Ronald Reagan's Administration have a cornucopia to choose from. Forme the nadir came in...
...In a widely televised news program, the survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald made his case in the Oval Office, while Reagan and his staff listenedpolitely—and then went out and did as they damn pleased...
...If Michael is gay, who is to say that he isn't HIV positive...
...Elizabeth Roles' costumes are as lively as the company, and Dean Taucher's scenic design makes the stage of the Century Theater glow...
...Jenifer turns to Michael for understanding...
...His wife, Jenifer (Jodie Markell), is an ex-actress haunted by real and fanciful worries...
...How dare this President equate the suffering of millions with the deaths of monsters...
...The ashes of the Holocaust retain their heat...
...The quartet manages some wild riffs and some brilliant solos en route to a solution, but therein lies the play's deepest flaw...
...A mysterious stranger (Guillermo Diaz) drops by, allegedly seeking to rent the apartment...
...What he does not know how to do is sustain dialogue...
...Gabe concedes—not totally, just enough to leave quietly, and to speak civilly to the German soldier he can no longer bring himself to loathe and fear...
...The traditional comedy of manners has been replaced by the comedy of bad manners...
...Michael remains torn, as does his father...
...I was a Communist and I raised a Republican," Gabe roars...
...Three young friends from the East are currently in Los Angeles seeking different lives...
...Gabe wants Michael to study for his forthcoming bar mitzvah...
...Their abrupt voyage could be considered a kidnapping—except that Michael is all too willing to stand by Gabe's side as he assumes a prayer shawl and chants kaddish at this most German of graveyards...
...His wife, Diane (Susan Warrick Hasho), tries to intervene as peacemaker...
...All of Jonathan's downtime—and there is a lot of it—is spent on the phone, hilariously conniving with his agent and checking his service for calls from producers...
...And yet by the fall newspapers will demand, as they always do, Where are the new American playwrights...
...This season Broadway has been filled with British imports, and revivals of Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill and Irving Berlin...
...Despite complaints and protests, the rumored Bitburg trip is set in stone...
...The contest is unequal...
...In which case, perhaps the couple's little daughter is suffering from a lot worse than the allergies her pediatrician has diagnosed...
...Jonathan, Jenifer and the stranger are all hyper, and this personality quirk allows them to ventilate their likes and dislikes, their fears and ambitions, without bothering to wait for an answer to their questions, or a set-up for their opinions...
...Then Jonathan makes a shocking discovery: The woman who was involved with Michael before he declared his sexual preference was— Jenifer...
...Unless you're in the market for brand names from the '40s or the West End, why go anywhere else...
...But at Sabbath dinner that night an uncomfortable fact leaks out...
...First he was dumped by his ex-roommate...
...It also displays the work of a gifted director, Jace Alexander, who keeps the pace con brio throughout...
...Leaving only a curt telephone message for Stuart and Diane, the grandfather has flown to the Federal Republic with his grandson in tow...
...Only by pleading and cajoling does Stuart bring his father around to the fact that some Germans may actually be good people, that a cycle of hate is a legacy he cannot bear to have Michael continue...
...Clearly, Michael and Jonathan could use each other's best attributes...
...officers...
...Playwright Arj e Shaw uses the Bitburg trip as the focus of his post-Holocaust drama, The Gathering...
...All the same, The Gathering has a cumulative power and an alleviating sense of humor, much abetted by Bikel's warm and impassioned work...
...Susan L. Soetaert's costumes enliven the proceedings, as does Robert Joel Schwartz' persuasive scenery and Andy Stein's mood music...
...There they have the freedom to stumble, to walk and to run...
...And by logical extension, who is to say that Jenifer isn't positive herself...
...It is in his own life that he fails to take action...
...Like Arje Shaw, Grant is a novice— even though he has had plenty of experience as an actor, most notably in the Broadway success d'estime, Angels In America...
...Gabe is not a fight fan...
...To him this is "the job of a lifetime," worth any sacrifice he might have to make...
...Chancellor Helmut Kohl wants it, and realpolitik requires Reagan to comply with his wishes...
...Right now Michael is in recovery from a shattered relationship, and the fact that a reduced income will force him to leave his large apartment...
...For many of the young, who have no memory of the War and its crimes, the Bitburg incident is irrelevant: It happened long ago, and in the parlance of the network anchor, Germany and the Jews have to seek closure...
...Then he became obsessed with the misfortunes of a client, a battered 12-year-old Latino girl...
...This sprains the long arm of coincidence, and betrays the playwright's inexperience...
...Act Two takes place at the Bitburg cemetery...
...But the woman who converted to Judaism out of love, the doctoral candidate in psychology, is no match for the temperaments at the table...
...What began as amusing backchat ("We'll be lucky if the three of us don't end up on Jerry Springer") quickly turns acrimonious and paranoid...
...But Michael only wants to play chess, a game at which he is rapidly becoming better than his opponent...
...When grandpa demurs, the boy raises the subject of agnosticism...
...At first, the actor seems so self-involved that even the child's health appears irrelevant to his career...
...To complicate matters, Michael is playing host to a straight couple, in from New York for a few days...
...Chief among the valid concerns is their ailing little daughter, whom the couple has left in New York while Jonathan tries to land a role in Hollywood...
...in the right hands it can provide some amusing moments, if not a wholly satisfactory evening...
...The social worker has been a loser in love in every sense of the word...
...Sometimes for a full season, sometimes just for a few weeks...
...Several days later the child was beaten nearly to death by the mother's live-in boyfriend...
...Enter Egon (Peter Hermann), a local soldier assigned to prepare the place for Reagan's arrival...
...I did not survive the camps to forgive and forget...
...He knows how to write an individual speech, and he knows how to mix the humorous with the poignant...
...Counters Stuart bitterly, "You hold on, I move on...
...Still, for an initial effort Snakebit shows great promise and showcases an expert cast...
...The answer is: They're offBroadway where they belong...
...When his boss saw how much Michael cared, he was taken off the case —emotional involvement is not allowed at the agency...
...Another debate ensues, this one between Gabe and the military man...
...Forme the nadir came in 1985, when he announced plans to visit Bitburg, burial place of many Nazi S.S...
...Gabe swells with pride at his son's accomplishment...
...Gabe stomps out, determined to seek vengeance for this affront to the Six Million...
...where does he get off telling a kid to study the Torah...
...Stuart turns out to be little more than a court Jew, practically genuflecting before the phone when Pat Buchanan calls with an imperious demand...
...Gabe is beside himself...
...Although the performances are uneven at the Jewish Repertory Theater, the real inconsistencies are in the writing: Stuart is a stiff in the first act, and a humane figure in the second, without any real motivation for his change...
...Act One opens with Gabe (Theodore Bikel), a bulky sculptor in his 70s, chipping away at a statue of his beloved Muhammad Ali...
...Egon becomes morally confused, conscious of his nation's guilty past, but unwilling to assume the burden of a crime that took place some 20 years before his birth...
...All he can do is sit around, affecting an indifference to circumstance...
...He has come out of the closet recently, after a temporary fling at heterosexuality...
...Into this melange of personalities come two new factors...
...Perhaps they always will...
...The other has to emerge from his solipsism and realize that the world has people with weightier problems than his...
...Other principles soon intrude on this good-natured go-around...
...He makes a good sounding board, and a shrewd adviser...
...And how dare Stuart be a paid apologist for this move...
...The knowledge that the actor was betrayed by his wife and his best friend is disturbing enough, but something else is operating here...
...Jonathan (Christopher Gartin) is an actor very much wrapped up in himself...
...Michael (Bill Brochtrup) is a dancer turned social worker...
...The notion of parity between the murderers and their quarry struck Elie Wiesel as so bizarre and so wrongheaded that he spoke out against it with even more than his customary eloquence...
...Case in point: David Marshall Grant's Snakebit...
...Egon is not merely a reasonable postwar Deutschlander, he is the son of a man who died in Israel, fighting for the nation's independence...
...Rebecca Taylor has directed withpanache and feeling...
...The graybeard, after all, doubts the existence of God...
...One needs to be more forceful, more determined about his life and career...
...He was to stop there, according to his press secretary, to commemorate World War II, a conflict "in which all suffered...
...That leaves the low-keyed Michael as the sole "normal" character—a wry irony, but hardly enough to make the evening as credible as it is amusing...
...Manifestly, the old man is big on principle, a fact that his grandson Michael (Jesse Adam Eisenberg) uses to his own advantage when he drops by...
...Politely he tries to shoo away the odd couple...
...Gabe is morally certain, convinced of every German's complicity in the Holocaust, unwilling to recognize any gesture as conciliatory if it is spoken with a guttural accent...
...They have done their best to see that Bitburg remains an open wound, neither forgiven nor forgotten...
...Those associated with The Gathering have a more acute sense of justice...
...What he admires is the boxer's moral stance: Ali went against his government at the time of the Vietnam War, even though it cost him the heavyweight title...
...Michael wants to go to the hospital to help in some way, but is afraid to lose his position...
...Michael's father, Stuart (Robert Fass), has just been hired as a White House speechwriter...
...The atmosphere gets more sullen when the stranger turns out to be the current lover of Michael's ex...
...This change is not always as negative as it sounds...
...Although the twoact play suffers from a kind of bipolar personality, it displays wit as well as reason, and a sharp ear for the way common people use uncommon rationales...
...The official word—that all the dead of World War II were victims—has gone out, and Stuart has done his part in parroting the line...
...But always with originality and a sense of possibility...
...By the time Michael's parents reach the scene, the acrimony has grown thick enough to cut with a bayonet...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 9
