In the last show of the Santa Maria Civic Theatre’s 56th season, the little theater off Broadway performs its production of Brooklyn Boy, a bittersweet comedy drama that tackles the crisis that comes along with being middle-aged.
Written by playwright Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Dinner With Friends and Sight Unseen, Brooklyn Boy tells the tale of an author whose book finally made the best sellers list. The boy from Brooklyn, Eric Weiss, played by Vince Surra (he played Max Holiday in Dial M for Murder), has spent most of his life running from his Jew-infused, Brooklyn roots.
It makes it all the more ironic that this book—his third, titled Brooklyn Boy—is based roughly on the characters and stories of his youth, and it’s the only successful book authored by Eric. He, of course, swears the characters are fictional, but the folks that know him—say, his childhood pal Ira Zimmer played by Phil Epstein—disagree. Zimmer, who palled around with Eric when they were kids and still lives in the Brooklyn house he grew up in, swears up and down that a character in the book is him as a child.
The play opens in Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. Eric is sitting next his sick father, Manny, played by Jim Sullivan, and basically trying to win the grumpy, hard-to-please man over by talking about the success of his bestseller and the book tour he’s on. The scene is intimate in that the depressing and witty dialogue is awkwardly familiar; Eric feels he’s never good enough for his father, and Manny is distant and quick to say he wishes things were different.
Manny wonders aloud about Eric’s wife and asks when they’re going to have a baby. Eric lies to his father, explaining that she, Nina (Angi Herrick), is great but extremely busy. In reality, Eric and Nina are separated, and his recent success is grating on what’s left of their marriage. Nina’s an author, too, but can’t seem to get anything off the ground.
Brooklyn Boy is all about the dialogue, with simple scenes and a humor that makes the audience laugh out loud. It pushes through Eric’s life now, his fraught relationships, and snippets of why his life is the way it is: He has a hard time connecting with the people in his life he should be closest to, and as much as he’s tried get far away from his past, he just can’t shake it.
The most telling scene takes place in a Los Angeles hotel room. Alison, played by Beka Castillo, a college-aged Eric Weiss fan who’s read all his books is sitting on the bed, and Eric can’t sit still. The tension between them builds throughout: Eric paces the room, Alison chats easily, and Eric gets agitated. Alison pats the bed, tells him to sit down, she reaches out to him, and abruptly he calls her a cab. The scene ends with bumbling realizations about life and age left hanging in the air around Eric.
Those questions continue to procreate throughout the play, culminating in the final scene as the lights dim and Eric pays homage to his roots by saying a Jewish prayer for his father, who recently passed away.
Contact Editor Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 7-14, 2015.