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Free Willy
Attention paid to Margulies in Gloucester
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Eventually, Donald Margulies became the sophisticated, Yale-affiliated bard of the educated who penned Collected Stories and won a Pulitzer Prize for Dinner with Friends. Earlier on, he was up to rawer and more offbeat stuff, notably in The Loman Family Picnic, which was presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1989 and again, in a revised version, in 1993. Surreally autobiographical (Margulies was born in 1954; the younger son of the play, which is set in 1965, is 11), The Loman Family Picnic meshes Margulies’s story with that of the fragmenting merchant of Arthur Miller’s iconic Death of a Salesman. In fact, the pipsqueak Margulies figure of the play, a precocious and creative type, is composing a musical version of Miller’s play entitled Willy! "Attention must be paid" in Margulies’s work as well to a sad-sack chaser of the American dream who unlike Willy is being pushed by a depressed wife and who like Willy is regarded as a fraying curiosity by his two sons. There’s even a visiting dead relative, though in this case, she’s the deceased but still chummy aunt of the wife rather than the gauzy older brother of Death of a Salesman, who wanders in and out of Willy Loman’s crumbling mind like a beacon of never-attained success. In the likable if tragicomic Loman Family Picnic, which veteran director Daniel Gidron helms in a perkily serviceable staging at Gloucester Stage Company, 38-year-old stay-at-home mom Doris starts the ball rolling, and signals that all is not well, by sitting on stage tearing her wedding dress to shreds; though she assures us how much she loves her life as wife to hard-working lighting-fixture salesman Herbie and mother to talented sons Stewie and Mitchell, she’s nonetheless turning the remnant of her rainy 18-years-ago nuptials into a Bride of Frankenstein costume for upcoming Halloween. Indeed, before intermission, she will appear as a reasonable replication of Elsa Lanchester (complete with streaked, piled hairdo), ready to trick-or-treat through the upwardly mobile Jewish family’s 23-story "middle-income luxury" Brooklyn apartment building. That gives you, on top of the confidence that she is soon to throw her elder son an expensive bar mitzvah "starring me," an idea of the disappointed Doris’s maturity and self-centeredness. Act two begins with photo-freeze glimpses of Doris’s dream rite-of-passage, with supporting appearances by bar mitzvah boy Stewie, Jule Styne aspirant Mitchell, and the beleaguered Herbie, who can ill afford the fête. In fact, it pushes him over the edge into an aria of cipher’s rage that’s painful to watch but is followed, in Mitchell’s bright-lit imagination, by the festive picnic scene from Willy!, with the entire family (including dead Aunt Marsha) singing and hoofing until Herbie merges the play’s caricatured comedy with its underlying tragedy in an up-tempo tune that culminates in the lyric "You shoulda seen me/Faking and lying/Shpieling and dealing,/Nobody buying./Schmoozing and losing/Never stopped trying./Fretting and slipping/And sweating and schlepping/And yelling and crying/But knowing I’m dying." This is a pretty daring merger and in some ways more interesting than Margulies’s more modulated later work. The play reminded me a little of John Guare’s early The House of Blue Leaves — with a rabbinical rather than a papal presence. But The Loman Family Picnic, with its cartoon depiction of Depression-era deprivation and World War II shell shock morphed into the combination of tradition, aspiration, and pretension that at once defines and frays this mid-’60s Jewish family, is as glibly grotesque as it is potentially poignant. And the GSC production isn’t always in skilled enough hands to rub those two disparate sticks together and make fireworks. Brandeis artist-in-residence Adrianne Krstansky, as Doris, is the heart of the production, capturing the genuine bewilderment beneath the cartoon. She also comes closest to carrying a tiny tune tucked into some big showmanship that is key to the musical sequences. None of the other actors can be even loosely described as a singer, though 12-year-old Steven Foley, as Mitchell, has the showmanship down. As Stewie, Bo Burnham proves the more believable actor, especially in the scene where, having collected $2300 and been officially declared a "man," he stands up to Stephen Sena’s repressed Herbie, whose sense of non-entity at last boils over into a grasping, unattractive rage. I could have lived without the play’s three endings, though they do go to prove that, where family’s concerned, Jewish or not, there never really is one.
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