Brooklyn Boy
BROOKLYN BOY
BOOKS BY DONALD MARGULIES
AVAILABLE FROM TCG
BROOKLYN BOY
COLLECTED STORIES
DINNER WITH FRIENDS
GOD OF VENGEANCE
LUNA PARK: SHORT PLAYS AND MONOLOGUES
Includes:
Nocturne
Luna Park
Pitching to the Star
July 7, 1994
SIGHT UNSEEN AND OTHER PLAYS
Includes:
Found a Peanut
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
The Model Apartment
The Loman Family Picnic
Sight Unseen
BROOKLYN BOY
A PLAY
Donald Margulies
THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP
NEW YORK
2005
Brooklyn Boy is copyright © 2005 by Donald Margulies
Brooklyn Boy is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018–4156
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Margulies, Donald.
Brooklyn boy / Donald Margulies.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-55936-747-9
1. Novelists—Drama. 2. Runaway wives—Drama. 3. Fathers and
sons—Drama. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Drama. 5. Parent and adult
child—Drama. 6. Separation (Psychology)—Drama. 7. Brooklyn (New
York, N.Y.)—Drama. 8. East Village (New York, N.Y.)—Drama.
I. Title.
PS3563.A653B76 2005
812’.54—dc222004029742
Cover and text design by Lisa Govan
Cover photograph: “A View from Brooklyn II,” 1953, by Rudy Burckhardt, courtesy of The Estate of Rudy Burckhardt and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Interior author photograph by Susan Johann
First Edition, February 2005
This play is for Herb Gardner
INTRODUCTION
Herb Gardner urged me to go back.
The author of the plays I’m Not Rappaport and Conversations with My Father, who died recently at sixty-eight after a tenacious struggle with emphysema, was my friend. A couple of years ago, he and I were having one of our marathon phone conversations, he at home on the Upper East Side, I in my office in New Haven, Connecticut, when I confided in him the difficulty I was having in starting a new play. I was in my mid-forties, coming down from the headiness of the biggest success of my career and suffering from a severe case of: “Now what?”
“I love your Brooklyn plays,” he said. “Why don’t you go back to Brooklyn?”
“I don’t want to go back to Brooklyn,” I told him. “It took me years to get out of Brooklyn, why would I want to go back now?”
“Because you’ve never looked at it from this point in your life before.”
Herb was right. I had tilled the soil of my Brooklyn-Jewish upbringing in a succession of semiautobiographical plays written during the ’70s and ’80s but had consciously steered clear of Brooklyn ever since. Retrospectively, there is a bildungsroman progression to these plays: Found a Peanut (1984), set in the concrete backyard of a Brooklyn apartment building on the last day of the summer of 1962, was a snapshot of childhood; The Loman Family Picnic (1989), centered on a nouveau-middle-class Brooklyn family’s tragicomically desperate handling of its firstborn son’s bar mitzvah; and What’s Wrong with This Picture? (1985), in which an adolescent reeling from his mother’s sudden death is confronted by the dead woman herself, who has come back on the last night of shiva to clean their Flatbush apartment.
While the focus of my 1991 play Sight Unseen was no longer on a Jewish son but on a mature Jewish artist, and the drama was set mostly in England, the play still had a foot—and, arguably, its heart—in Brooklyn. The play served effectively as a bridge between the provincial Brooklyn of my youth and the outside world; it also proved to be the career breakthrough that enriched my life in many ways, not the least of which was that it provided the catalyst for my friendship with Herb Gardner.
Shortly after Sight Unseen premiered in New York at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1992 (it originated the previous year at South Coast Repertory), I was invited to write a piece for the New York Times. The essay, “A Playwright’s Search for the Spiritual Father” (which ran on Father’s Day), was a rumination on fathers and mentors, creativity and influence. In it, I described the seminal experience, at age eight, of seeing my first Broadway play. The play that had me utterly transfixed was A Thousand Clowns; the playwright was Herb Gardner.
A few days after the article ran, I received a note from a man I’d never met: “What, here it is Sunday and you don’t give your spiritual father a call?” The writer of the note, of course, was Herb, and, fatefully, he included his telephone number. I called him, we met, and I instantly acquired a new old friend, one with whom I would commiserate, kvetch and laugh, over meals and, as his disease progressed, increasingly over the phone, for the next decade.
I can’t muse about Brooklyn without thinking about Herb. We were both Brooklyn boys, although he was nearly a generation older; Herb’s Brooklyn was my parents’ Brooklyn. Theirs was the real thing, the Brooklyn of legend, not the faded, ghostly place where baby boomers like me grew up.
My parents met at a block party in Flatbush on V-J Day. Their wartime courtship took on an iconic quality in my imagination, as if they were stars of their own Warner Brothers picture, set to a Big Band score.
My fantasy was fed by movies of that era that mythologized Brooklyn and made archetypes of its people, all of them blunt, unpretentious, salt-of-the-earth, who spoke a kind of roughhewn poetry. War movies always seemed to include lovable, vaguely Jewish GIs who hailed from or were even called “Brooklyn” and who would no doubt be dead by the final reel. Family photos from the ’40s pictured preternaturally mature bobby-soxers with lipstick and cigarettes, seemingly all of them resembling Olivia de Havilland or Linda Darnell.
To have come of age in Eisenhower-era, baby-boomer Brooklyn was to feel cheated of the glory days. The Dodgers had already moved west; Ebbets Field was leveled and replaced with a high-rise housing project. Steeplechase Park in Coney Island shut its doors when I was ten; I was there exactly once, shortly before it closed, and still recall my one exhilarating spin down its burnished mahogany slide.
By the late ’60s, public school education, which had served me
and my fellow boomers so well for a time, was no longer a panacea for upwardly mobile middle-class kids. The families of those kids moved upward—or outward—to the suburban promise of Long Island and sent once-solid Brooklyn neighborhoods spiraling downward.
Once urban flight took hold, the last vestiges of my parents’ Brooklyn vanished. Streets and subways were no longer safe. The Sheepshead movie theater was converted into a roller-skating rink; the Elm Theatre became a bank. Ebinger’s Bakery, famous for its chocolate blackout cakes, went out of business and Dubrow’s Cafeteria, best known for its kasha varnishkas, closed its revolving doors.
If I long for Brooklyn it is not so much for the geographical place where I spent my childhood but for an ethos that was already dead or dying by the time I was old enough to realize that something was amiss. When I look back at Brooklyn now, from the vantage point of the middle of my life, I find that it is a place that no longer exists, indeed one that may never have truly existed in my lifetime. Maybe it’s because I no longer have a familial connection to the place; my parents are long gone and my brother has moved to L.A. Maybe it’s a feeling I’ve always had. I was nostalgic for my parents’ and Herb Gardner’s Brooklyn ever since I was a boy.
When I was growing up in Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island in the ’50s and ’60s, the Brooklyn Bridge took on for me almost mystical significance. That exquisite span was the gateway to a gleaming city where the future was bound to be more exciting than that which lay ahead in Brooklyn. In my young, television-addled mind, the New York skyline had merged with that of the Emerald City, a magical notion fed by repeated annual viewings of The Wizard of Oz. Manhattan was a place rendered in vivid Technicolor while Brooklyn’s hue was not even black-and-white but drab sepia.
Perhaps it is the omnipresence of that majestic bridge and those shimmering skyscrapers that contribute to the Brooklynite’s perpetual state of self-consciousness, for those landmarks are constant reminders of his marginal place in the world. The Brooklynite lives on the periphery, tantalizingly within reach of Something Else, Something Greater, lying just across the river. It is precisely that condition which shapes personalities, fuels ambitions, and creates in some an overwhelming sense of restlessness and yearning.
Brooklyn is the metaphoric home to anyone who has ever seen himself as an outsider, who has ever been torn between the powerful, atavistic tug toward the traditional and familiar and the magnetic allure of the unknown.
Brooklyn is the past recorded in faded Super 8. It is innocence, childhood, family, community, a safe place. Brooklyn is Rosebud, Camelot, Atlantis. It is the state of grace that exists solely in memory or fantasy. Brooklyn is the precious thing we’ve lost.
So when my friend called me back to Brooklyn that day on the phone, I followed, with all the queasy curiosity of a prodigal son looking homeward. I knew the terrain well but hadn’t walked it as a man in midlife. Scenes began to lay themselves out; I started to get a sense of the landscape of a new play. It would not be a sentimental journey bathed in nostalgia, but a fresh exploration of old themes, clear-eyed and present tense. If Sight Unseen was a play about leaving Brooklyn, then Brooklyn Boy would be one about looking back.
Ten years ago What’s Wrong with This Picture? opened on Broadway. As the actors took their curtain call, two huge hands grasped my shoulders in triumph. It was Herb, seated in the row behind me. How fitting that the man who was largely responsible for my early infatuation with theater should be present on the night of my Broadway debut, literally right behind me, cheering me on. In a sense, Herb, the über Brooklyn boy, was there all along.
Donald Margulies
New Haven, Connecticut
This essay first appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, September 5, 2004.
BROOKLYN BOY
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Brooklyn Boy was commissioned by South Coast Repertory (David Emmes, Producing Artistic Director, Martin Benson, Artistic Director; Paula Tomei, Managing Director) in Costa Mesa, California. It was originally co-produced by South Coast Repertory and Manhattan Theatre Club (Lynne Meadow, Artistic Director; Barry Grove, Executive Producer). It received its world premiere at South Coast Repertory on September 3, 2004. It was directed by Daniel Sullivan; the set design was by Ralph Funicello, the lighting design was by Chris Parry, the original music and sound design were by Michael Roth, the costume design was by Jess Goldstein, the dramaturg was Jerry Patch and the stage manager was Scott Harrison. The cast was as follows:
ERIC WEISS
MANNY WEISS
IRA ZIMMER
NINA
ALISON
MELANIE FINE
TYLER SHAW
Adam Arkin
Allan Miller
Arye Gross
Dana Reeve
Ari Graynor
Mimi Lieber
Kevin Isola
Brooklyn Boy opened on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre on February 3, 2005, with the following changes: Polly Draper played the part of Nina and the production stage manager was Roy Harris.
CHARACTERS
ERIC WEISS, a novelist, mid-forties
MANNY WEISS, his father, seventy
IRA ZIMMER, Eric’s childhood friend, mid-forties
NINA, Eric’s wife, forties
ALISON, a film student, twenties
MELANIE FINE, a film producer, late thirties
TYLER SHAW, a movie star, early twenties
SETTING
The present. Brooklyn, the East Village
and Los Angeles.
SCENES
Act One
SCENE 1: Maimonides
SCENE 2: Cafeteria
SCENE 3: St. Mark’s Place
Act Two
SCENE 4: Mondrian
SCENE 5: Paramount
SCENE 6: Ocean Avenue
ACT ONE
SCENE 1
Maimonides
Maimonides Hospital, Brooklyn. Ambient sounds. The wall-mounted television is on, its back to the audience, the soundtrack of an old movie barely audible. Manny Weiss dozes in a hospital bed. His breathing is labored. He is ill; several IVs are attached. His son, Eric, dressed casually but well, carrying a hardcover book, the Daily News and the New York Post, enters and watches him breathe. He drapes his coat and umbrella over a chair, puts his gifts on the crank table beside an abandoned food tray, and sits. He watches the movie on TV. Soon Manny awakens and sees Eric.
MANNY: Jesus, I must be sicker than I thought.
ERIC: Hi.
MANNY (Sits up with effort; disoriented): What time is it?
ERIC (Looks at his watch): 2:43.
MANNY: Day or night?
ERIC: Day.
MANNY: How long you been sitting there?
ERIC: Not long. How long have you been sleeping?
MANNY: I wasn’t sleeping; I was just closing my eyes.
ERIC: Uh-huh.
MANNY: Fix me. (Meaning his position)
(Eric raises the bed electronically and puffs up pillows to prop up Manny.)
Higher. Lower. Lower. Uh! (Meaning, “Stop!”)
ERIC: Better?
MANNY: I don’t know. Leave it, the hell with it. Thought you were out of town.
ERIC: I was. I was in Miami.
MANNY: Can’t keep track of you. When’d you get back?
ERIC: Last night. And I’m leaving again tomorrow.
MANNY: Again?!
ERIC (Nods, then): Tomorrow I go to L.A. I wanted to see you.
MANNY (Sarcastic): All the way to Brooklyn just to see me? Gee, I’m honored. Your wife with you?
ERIC: No.
MANNY: I never see her—Nina. She’s always busy.
ERIC: She is busy. She sends her best, though.
MANNY: That’s nice. (A beat) Got any good news for me?
ERIC: What kind of good news?
MANNY: You know.
ERIC (A beat): No. No good news.
MANNY: Thought maybe I had something to lo
ok forward to.
ERIC (Regarding the TV): What movie is this?
MANNY: What?
ERIC: I’m trying to figure out what movie this is. Ronald Colman, Shelley Winters . . .
MANNY: Don’t ask me. It was black-and-white, I left it on.
(Silence as they both watch.)
ERIC: A Double Life? (Manny shrugs) I think it is. Ronald Colman’s an actor playing Othello who starts confusing the role with real life? (Manny shrugs. They watch) See? She’s his Desdemona.
MANNY: His what?
ERIC: Never mind. Haven’t you been watching it?
MANNY: I’ve been looking at it, yeah; that doesn’t mean I’ve been paying attention.
(Eric turns it off.)
Hey!
ERIC: You said you weren’t watching it.
MANNY: I did not say that! Turn it back on!
ERIC: Okay! (Turns it back on)
MANNY: I like having it on. It gives me something to look at.
ERIC: Well, excuse me. Mind if I mute it at least? I don’t like having to compete with the television.
MANNY: Do what you want. As long as you leave the picture. (Stays fixed on the silent image)
ERIC: So? How’re you feeling?
(Manny shrugs.)
How was your night?
MANNY: Terrific.
ERIC: Really?
MANNY: No. What do you think? It’s like Klein’s basement in here. Nurses in and out all night long—you should see what goes on here!
ERIC: Has the doctor been in to see you today?
MANNY: Which doctor?
ERIC: Dr. Patel?
MANNY: Which one is he?
ERIC: The oncologist.
MANNY: The Indian guy?
ERIC: Yeah. Has he been here today?