Brooklyn Boy Read online

  (Pause.)

  ZIMMER: Ricky, Kaddish isn’t about death.

  ERIC: Ira . . .

  ZIMMER (Continuous): It’s about reaffirming life. Why don’t you just try it with me? (Offers the yarmulke) Do it for your dad. Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash—

  (Eric throws the yarmulke to the floor. Pause. Zimmer picks it up and kisses it. Silence.)

  Well. (Makes motions toward leaving) If you ever have a change of heart . . . you know where to find me.

  ERIC: 1911 Avenue X.

  ZIMMER (Nods, remembers the offer of liquor): You sure you don’t mind if I, uh . . .

  ERIC: Help yourself. (Silence as he watches Zimmer select boxes of liquor) Ira? You were right.

  ZIMMER: About what?

  ERIC: He’s you.

  ZIMMER: What?

  ERIC: Seth Bernstein is you.

  ZIMMER (Pleased): He is? (Eric nods) He is? (Eric nods again) I knew it!

  ERIC: Thanks for the shiva call.

  ZIMMER: Don’t mention it.

  ERIC (A beat): So long, Ira.

  ZIMMER (Nods, then): Zy’gezunt.

  (Zimmer touches the mezuzah on the doorway and kisses his fingers as he exits. Eric resumes packing. He tosses some books into a box. Manny appears, looking healthy, in clothing typical of what he wore in life.)

  MANNY: Did it kill you to tell him he was Seth Bernstein?

  ERIC: No, it didn’t kill me.

  MANNY: What did you think it would do to you? Huh? You think it would take away from what you wrote?

  (Eric thinks about that. Manny walks around the room.)

  So defensive, Ricky. Why so defensive?

  ERIC: Oh, I don’t know, do you think it might have something to do with having you as a father?

  MANNY: With me? Why is everything me?

  ERIC: Why? Because everything is you. You never bothered to understand what the hell I was about, so you clobbered me at every turn.

  MANNY (Mock tears): “My father doesn’t understand me . . .”

  ERIC (Over “. . . understand me . . .”): Okay, very funny, knock it off . . .

  (Manny laughs. Eric resumes packing and warily watches him in silence.)

  MANNY: Too bad about Nina.

  ERIC: You know?

  MANNY: Sure I know; I know everything now. She’s a lovely girl Nina, but very insecure. I knew she was gonna be a handful. I could tell from day one.

  ERIC: Then why didn’t you say anything?

  MANNY: Why, you would’ve listened to what I had to say? Yeah, sure. (At the bookcase) Look at all the books your mother had! Anything Jewish. Marjorie Morningstar. She loved Marjorie Morningstar. Leon Uris. Exodus, Mila 18. Always with the books. You got it from her. I read maybe a couple start to finish the last fifty years.

  ERIC: Yeah? What.

  MANNY: My Gun Is Quick. Mickey Spillane. Excellent book. I, the Jury. The follow-up. I liked that too. Henry Miller. Nexus, Plexus, Sexus? Remember those?

  ERIC: Uh-huh.

  MANNY (Continuous): The books that were banned in Boston? I didn’t read the whole books, though, just the dirty parts. And, boy, were they dirty! Filthy! Some of the stuff he had going on in there! (Whistles) Unbelievable! I kept them hidden in my night table.

  ERIC: I know; I found them.

  MANNY: Son of a gun! (A beat) Your mother’s been dead how long?, thirty-odd years? You’d think a man all alone, pacing these four and a half rooms, books and books all around, might one day pick one up to see what was inside—out of curiosity, if nothing else. But, no. Not me. Not once.

  ERIC: That’s an amazing feat, Dad. How’d you manage that?

  MANNY: It wasn’t easy.

  ERIC: What was it, one more way of getting back at me?

  MANNY: You scared the shit out of me! From the first words you read out loud—you were like not yet four, I knew I was in big trouble. Thank God I had the store; I was the smartest guy in the world in that store. I had those shoeboxes arranged perfectly, in size order. I needed to be the master of something, for crissake, why not shoes? At least they don’t talk back. (A beat) You know, simple men may not have the talent for words and ideas that some men have, but don’t assume there’s nothing going on behind the silence and the sarcasm. There’s plenty.

  ERIC: Like what?

  MANNY: Oh, a kind of terror. That’s all. Resentment. That sort of thing. Embarrassment. Shame.

  ERIC: Why shame?

  MANNY: Why? Because a husband should be first in the eyes of his wife, not the son, that’s why shame.

  ERIC: She loved you, Dad.

  MANNY: I know that; you don’t have to tell me that. But let’s not kid ourselves, boychik, she adored you. You came in first; I only placed. It’s not natural when the son wins. It leaves the poor schmuck father out in the cold and that makes him mad. And for the son? It’s very confusing. Look what it did to you.

  ERIC: What did it do to me. I think I did pretty well considering the years of psychological abuse heaped on me by my father.

  MANNY: Let me ask you this: Was that such a bad thing?

  ERIC: What?!

  MANNY: I gave you something to write about. If everything was hunky-dory, you’d be just another Brooklyn boy with no particular stories to tell. Would you have a critically acclaimed autobiographical novel on the best-seller list? I don’t think so.

  ERIC: So, let me see if I’ve got this straight: I’m supposed to be grateful to you for belittling me my entire life?

  MANNY (Shrugs): Think about it: You had your mother thinking your shit was gold and I, who made a point of telling you it stank like everybody else’s. Two adoring parents would’ve been overkill.

  ERIC (Skeptical): So you were doing me a favor.

  MANNY: Basically.

  ERIC: Huh.

  MANNY (A beat): Oh, I read your book, by the way.

  ERIC: You did?

  MANNY: Uh-huh.

  ERIC: All of it?

  MANNY: Yeah. Why? You surprised?

  ERIC: Well, yeah. I assumed you didn’t get a chance to read it.

  MANNY: I started after you left and I couldn’t put it down. I stayed up all that night and into the morning before the sepsis hit.

  ERIC: So what are you telling me? My book killed you? Great.

  MANNY (Laughs): No no no. (A beat) I liked it.

  ERIC: You did? (Manny nods) Really?

  MANNY: I really did. It’s a good book you wrote, Ricky.

  ERIC (Pleasantly surprised): Thanks, Dad.

  MANNY: You sure were paying attention all those years. You’ve got everything in there. I laughed, I cried. It all came back to me. Everything. Our whole lives. (A beat) You did good.

  ERIC: Thanks.

  MANNY (A beat): How do you do it?

  ERIC: Do what?

  MANNY: How do you sit down and build something out of words, something that wasn’t there before?

  ERIC (Shrugs): I invent. And imagine. And remember.

  MANNY: Yeah? And then somehow you put it into words?

  ERIC (Nods): Yeah.

  MANNY: I could never do that. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Must be a great thing to be able to do.

  ERIC: It is. (Pause) Dad? Why couldn’t we talk like this when you were alive?

  MANNY (Shrugs): Life isn’t like this. (A beat) Ah, it’s just as well. You wouldn’t be you if we did; you’d be somebody else. An accountant or something.

  (Eric laughs. Manny recedes into the shadows. Silence. Eric turns on the TV. A ball game. He comes upon the paper Zimmer left behind on which Kaddish is written. He tentatively puts on the yarmulke and haltingly reads, his voice becoming more confident as he proceeds.)

  ERIC: Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash sh’may ra’bbo, b’olmo dee’vro chir’usay v’yamlich malchu’say, b’chayaychon uv’yomay’-chon uv’chayay d’chol bai Yisroel, ba’agolo u’viz’man koriv; v’imru Omein . . .

  (Lights fade.)

  END OF PLAY

  DONALD MARGULIES received the 2000
Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends (Variety Arts Theatre, New York; Comedie des Champs-Elysées, Paris; Hampstead Theatre, London; Actors Theatre of Louisville; South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa). The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world.

  His other plays include God of Vengeance, based on the Yiddish classic by Sholom Asch (ACT Theatre, Seattle; Williamstown Theatre Festival); Collected Stories (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, with Dame Helen Mirren; South Coast Repertory; Manhattan Theatre Club; HB Studio/Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York, with Uta Hagen), which received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle/Ted Schmitt Award, L.A. Ovation Award, a Drama Desk nomination, and was a finalist for both the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Model Apartment (Los Angeles Theatre Center; Primary Stages, New York), which received the OBIE Award for Playwriting, Drama-Logue Award, a Drama Desk nomination, and was also a Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award finalist; The Loman Family Picnic (Manhattan Theatre Club), which received a Drama Desk nomination; What’s Wrong with This Picture? (Manhattan Theatre Club; Jewish Repertory Theatre, New York; on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre); Two Days (Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven); Broken Sleep: Three Plays (Williamstown Theatre Festival); July 7, 1994 (Actors Theatre of Louisville); Found a Peanut (The Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival); Pitching to the Star (West Bank Cafe, New York); Resting Place (Theater for the New City, New York); Gifted Children; Zimmer and Luna Park (the last three originating at the Jewish Repertory Theatre).

  Sight Unseen, which was commissioned by South Coast Repertory, received its world premiere there in 1991, and was subsequently produced Off-Broadway by Manhattan Theatre Club. It received an Obie Award for Best New American Play, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, a Drama Desk nomination, and was also a Pulitzer finalist. In May 2004, it premiered on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre.

  Mr. Margulies has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was the recipient of the 2000 Sidney Kingsley Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre. Mr. Margulies is an alumnus of New Dramatists and serves on the council of The Dramatists Guild of America. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Visual Arts, 1977) from Purchase College of the State University of New York.

  Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954, Mr. Margulies lives with his wife, Lynn Street, who is a physician, and their son, Miles, in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.