Dan Wackerman

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Two Jews, Talking

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Two Jews, Talking

Old Testament history has been amply recreated on the stage and in film—enslavement in Egypt, the Hebrews’ 40-year desert trek to Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, transmission of Jewish laws, and a passionate yearning for the Promised Land. In Two Jews, Talking, playwright Ed. Weinberger loosely and innovatively paints both this saga, a “revisionist” desert adventure, and its cemetery-centered finale, with a very broad brush. He does so with the aid of veteran actors Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell, whose characters face off against each other theologically and temperamentally yet find comfort in each other’s company.

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Morning’s at Seven

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Morning’s at Seven

Paul Osborn’s play Morning’s At Seven is one of theater’s great rescues. A flop on Broadway in 1939, it was resurrected in 1980 by director Vivian Matalon, whose peerless production established it as a classic piece of Americana. It’s a gentle satire on small-town life, with busybodies and petty jealousies and snobbery, and although it’s as sturdily constructed as a Chekhov play, it’s not as dark. There may be conflicts, but the characters have more fun—and are fun to be around.

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Sideways

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Sideways

When writer Rex Pickett was trying to get his novel Sideways published, he submitted it to film studios as well as book publishers. He has now adapted the novel as a play, but the story’s cinematic nature works against it on stage. Because there are so many scene changes, scenery is simplified to tables and chairs (and the occasional counter or bed) that can be hastily reconfigured to represent various homes, bars, restaurants and outdoor locales. But Sideways has such a strong sense of place—the Oscar-winning 2004 movie fueled a tourism boom for California’s Santa Ynez Valley, and a map of film locations is still available on the Santa Barbara visitors bureau website—that it’s shortchanged by many scenes looking similar and the same backdrop, a lone tree, remaining for the entire play. What scenic designer David L. Arsenault has created is okay (the multiple levels and a faux hot tub work well); it’s just not enough to evoke the landscapes and idea of traveling.

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The Show-Off

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The Show-Off

The tension between a powerful social hierarchy and an unconventional hero, often an underdog, provides a frequent source of mid-20th-century American comedy. The friction arises in Mary Chase’s Harvey, Abe Burrows, Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac, Philip Barry’s Holiday, and Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mr. Roberts. The sympathy for the heroes of those comedies is a foregone conclusion: they are on the side of the angels, as it were. But that’s surprisingly not the case in George Kelly’s The Show-Off, a hard-edged 1920s work admirably revived by the Peccadillo Theater Company. Kelly’s title character, Aubrey Piper, is a great creation, an annoying rascal and a liar, and one waits impatiently for him to get his comeuppance.

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