‘Brooklyn Boy’: When ‘success’ is not enough

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — In the play Brooklyn Boy, novelist Eric “Ricky” Weiss (Cris O’Bryon) should feel as if he’s on top of the world.  His roman-a-clef, also bearing the title Brooklyn Boy, has made it to Number 11 on the New York Times best seller list. Katie Couric has interviewed him on television. Magazines are giving him admiring write-ups. But, in one situation after another, we see that Ricky’s life is miserable, and that not one of his relationships is successful.

His father Manny (Paul Bourque), a widower, whom we meet in a hospital bed, is indifferent to his son’s success.  On the other hand, Ricky is remote and distant when he meets in the hospital cafeteria a childhood friend, Ira Zimmer (Fred Harlow), who enthuses about the novel and the character within it who is patterned after him (both have one undescended testicle).  Before the first act of .Donald Margulies’ drama that is playing through February 19 at the Scripps Ranch Theatre, we learn that Eric’s wife Nina (Amanda Cooley Davis) is divorcing him, believing that compared to him, she has been a failure in everything she has done.

There’s more of the same in the second act.  His relationship goes nowhere with Alison, a UCLA coed (Charlene Koepf) who willingly accompanies Ricky to the luxurious hotel room paid for by the movie studio seeking movie rights to his book.  He flares at producer Melanie Fine (Wendy Waddell) and movie star Tyler Shaw (Adam Daniel) who like his book but think it’s “too Jewish,” and the drumbeat of unsuccessful relationships goes on.   What is the cause of Ricky’s disconnection with everyone around him?  For that you’ll have to wait for the end of the play.

The performance that I attended seemed a little rough around the edges. O’Bryon’s long pauses gave the impression he was struggling to remember his lines; a flubbed piece of dialogue here and there by other cast members deepened the suspicion that perhaps insufficient time had been scheduled for rehearsals.  Nevertheless, the actors were all professionals who quickly recovered from these little glitches and moved the play on to its touching conclusion.  Along with the rest of the audience, I was particularly impressed by the gusto of Harlow’s performance and the intensity of Davis’s.

The Scripps Ranch Theatre production was performed in Alliant University’s Legler Benbough Theatre, which features a long, narrow stage surrounded by a semicircle of seating.  Yeager’s backdrop throughout the play was a long row of some 10 bookcases filled with books, liquor bottles, bric-a-brac, and lamps.  For nearly every scene, furniture would be moved around and a different piece of art work hung from a hook on one of the bookcases.  It took me a while to realize that I was supposed to ignore the bookcases in many of the scenes, although eventually they became relevant to the action.

The character Eric Weiss joked bitterly that he, like the Erich Weiss who became known to the world as “Houdini,” were both escape artists — the novelist having “escaped from Brooklyn.”  In that he “doth protest too much.”  Can anyone really escape the city and family in which they grow up, or the religion they practice through their childhoods?

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com