'Brooklyn Boy': Home (and Hollywood) Is Where the Hurt Is

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Briefly at the beginning of "Brooklyn Boy," as a grown man visits his ailing, comically abrasive father in the hospital, Olney Theatre Center audiences might shift impatiently with unease. That's because as drama, the encounter is so painfully familiar that it could quickly descend into sentimental cliche.

Fortunately, in the deft hands of playwright Donald Margulies -- a Pulitzer winner for "Dinner With Friends" -- the scene displays a keen ear for emotional shifts in director Jim Petosa's generally pitch-perfect production.

Eric Weiss is the son, a middle-aged man who's suddenly a best-selling novelist, yet who remains maddeningly unable to please his dad. Instead of turning trite, though, the situation triggers a funny and wise sequence of events, as Weiss confronts the old Jewish neighborhood, which is both the setting of his popular new book and the life he left behind.

Margulies is full of entertaining surprises, even if his tactics are old-fashioned. Modern plays often gravitate toward the staccato and surreal, but the playwright instead gives us long, naturalistic scenes. As "Brooklyn Boy" is allowed to leisurely unfold, its unhurried rhythm even becomes a joke when Weiss squires his tale to Hollywood, where his much-lauded dialogue must be slashed. It seems movie audiences can't pay attention longer than five minutes.

"They really can't," producer Melanie Fine tells the novelist as definitively as if she were saying, "The Earth is round."

"Brooklyn Boy" suggests that audiences really can pay attention longer, in no small part because the wide-open space inside these scenes is like oxygen for actors.

The characters' behavior is richly detailed, including the infantile manipulations that the father (Howard Elfman) amusingly heaps on the haunted-looking Weiss (Paul Morella), as well as the tense body language between Weiss and Nina (Lee Mikeska Gardner), his estranged gentile wife.

For Weiss, who's ripe for a midlife crisis, belated success unluckily intersects with divorce and a terminally ill parent. Morella captures the character's slightly gloomy, distracted air and finds the right degree of arrogance. Weiss might be back in the old neighborhood, but he's no longer of it -- a discordance we can detect in the sharp cut of his suit (the culture-conscious costumes are by Howard Vincent Kurtz) and in how he politely recoils from Ira Zimmer, a childhood buddy he hasn't seen in years.

Zimmer, played with an absorbing combination of shame and street smarts by Ethan T. Bowen, is everything Weiss has worked hard not to be -- including conspicuously Jewish. Yet neither the claims that Zimmer crudely makes nor the wreckage of Weiss's keenly detailed marriage are easily shaken off by the novelist. As Weiss heads to Hollywood with his bestseller -- James Kronzer's efficient set rotates to reveal the new locales -- the writer seems like a lost soul.

Can he find himself with Alison (a literary groupie), or with that producer and the buff blond stud considered for the lead in the movie? Margulies gives Tinseltown the usual drubbing, but at least he does it with style. The conversation that Weiss has with Alison -- a sexy, deceptively insightful film-school student (Emerie Snyder, warm and carefree as a summer breeze) -- is a hoot, not least because the setting is a hotel bed strewn, aptly, with junk food.

Three splendidly acted scenes -- Weiss in turn with Bowen's caffeinated Zimmer, then Gardner's alluringly sorrowful Nina, then with Snyder's bright Alison -- defy expectations. Rewardingly, they contain more than their share of personal history and psychological nuance.

Margulies, unfortunately, can't pack as much of this freshness into the ending. The play pauses on the producer (Halo Wines, nicely soft-pedaling the familiar barbarisms) and the stud (Paul Cereghino, rather likable as the earnest airhead) before zipping back to Brooklyn.

"Brooklyn Boy's" agitated comedy and basic sincerity once or twice feels like Neil Simon, though Margulies is the more penetrating playwright. Because of this Simonesque echo, maybe it eventually seems as though you've seen this before. But that's a small complaint. After being in such bracing company for two hours, it's hard to begrudge Margulies a soft landing on hallowed ground.