High Holidays
I went into opening night of the Goodman Theatre’s new production of High Holidays, written by native Chicago playwright Alan Gross, prepared to be pleased.
It is not for nothing that Goodman productions are often considered to be among the finest in the Windy City, and I have been rarely disappointed. This is not to say that High Holidays doesn’t have its merits, not the least of which is a commanding, gut-wrenching and uproarious performance from Keith Kupferer as family patriarch Nate. However, despite the show’s sizable list of positives, there are two decided negatives that prevent me from giving the production an unqualified recommendation.
The first detractor is the running time. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the redundant action and dialogue imbedded in Gross’s original script lends itself to one’s awareness that two and a half hours have passed by the time the actors take the stage for their deserved applause. Director Steven Robman would have done well to pick up his editorial scissors to excise a good 20-30 minutes of material. The result would surely have been a tighter, even funnier comedy of family dynamics.
Stimulated by Gross’s own autobiographical sketch of a young boy growing up Jew in suburbia, High Holidays is a four-character slapstick drama, centering around your typical 1960s family in crisis. The very message of the play seems to be that, almost beside the point of specific ethnic hijinx and catastrophe, every American clan understood turmoil in the post-McCarthyism, pre-Vietnam War era, on the eve of Kennedy’s assassination. It was a heady time when the clash of immigrant, first-generation old world values bumped up against the brash revolutionism of the Bob Dylan age bracket.
Nate (Kupferer) and Essie (Rengin Altay) are reminiscent of a Dan and Roseanne Connor for the hippie crowd. Hard-working, hard-saving children of refugees from the Nazi siege upon European Jews in the 1940s, these parents, particularly Nate, never stop feeling they have something to prove to their offspring. Though he never appears onstage, "Big Ben," Nate’s father, is given the believable aura of the master puppeteer, pulling the strings of each desire his son projects onto his own children. Nate and Essie are somewhat liberal and indulgent, ahead of their time with their R-rated language and their sense of middle age as a period of still-youthful wisdom.
As the play opens, it is 67 days before Nate and Essie’s youngest son, Billy (Max Zuppa), is to experience the Jewish male rite of passage, the bar mitzvah. Billy is precociously anxious about participating, as much from uncertainty as to what he’ll be saying in front of the whole world (in both the literal and figurative sense), as a fear of embarrassment. Elder son Rob (Ian Paul Custer), is home from school in Bloomington, Indiana for the high Jewish holidays as well as the preparations for his brother’s big ritual. However, Rob has a skeleton of his own to expose: he has dropped out of school, determined to buck the system and its rules in search of musical greatness. The great bulk of the dramatic tension in the concurrently hilarious dialogue stems from the push and pull between the adherence to tradition and the fight for youthful post-modern individuality.
However, as side-splittingly funny as High Holidays often is, the script does occasionally belabor its points. Unfortunately a good portion of the first half (there is a 15 minute intermission) feels bloated, at times beating the dead horse of an initially funny bit.
However, the most egregious misstep in the Goodman Theatre production is found in the stage direction, a judgment call that can only be attributed to Director Robman. The front door of Nate and Essie’s home is placed lower stage right, nearly to the farthest corner of usable space. For a good 80 percent of the audience this is no problem. However, for those of us seated in the first balcony on the stage right side, it’s an unforgivable hassle. Imagine 12 heads craning their necks forward simultaneously, only intermittently successful at seeing what was taking place, and it follows that a good deal did go down at the family threshold. Rude whispers to sit back were exchanged between audience members. More than unnecessary, this failure to anticipate obstructed lines of sight affected one’s complete immersion in the action of the story.
High Holidays is a fast-paced, dialogue-heavy work, and tremendous credit goes to all four cast members for their extremely worthy performances. While Kupferer, as the wounded Nate, has been singled out for special recognition, praise is equally owing to Altay and Custer, as mother and son Essie and Rob, for their empathetic, comedic turns. Young Zuppa acquits himself nicely in his role as daydreamer Billy, and has a promising career to anticipate.
With its often coarse language, brief male nudity, and casual drug use, High Holidays should be considered for mature audiences only. For theater patrons willing to give almost three hours to a flawed but entertaining production, guaranteed laughs will be your reward. Just remember not to sit stage right.
High Holidays runs through November 29 at Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, in Chicago.
Performance schedule: Tuesday--Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8:00 p.m.; Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.; Sunday at 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Info phone: 312-443-3800. For more information call 312-443-3800 or visit www.goodmantheatre.org
