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Don Bridges Australia
Claudine Jones San Francisco
Michael Bettencourt Boston
Chandradasan India
Ned Bobkoff Buffalo
Steve&Lucille Esquerré New Orleans

      

NED BOBKOFF in BUFFALO

Reviews

Uncle Phillip’s Coat
A play by Matty Selman.
Based on a story by Matty Selman and Larry Block
(Jewish Community Center, Rochester, New York)

Larry Block opens his monologue by crashing on stage with a beat up old overcoat and a pocket full of braissieres. “Does anyone have something to eat?” he says. To a couple of elderly men in the audience about to nod off: “Go ahead, nod off. If I can bring you a few moments of restful sleep, I won’t be insulted.”

Whether listening to his father’s advice, evoking memories of Ellis Island, or wearing his Uncle Phillip’s coat with a collar of fake sable, Larry Block is a loft mensch – a dreamer; a chip off the old block. He prowls the stage like his uncle did the boardwalk at Coney Island, selling and deploying  brassieres, shooting them out on his arms. A Chagall floating angel in full blast, he delivers an uproarious, continuously unfolding spiel - laced with poignancy. Turning his coat inside out, changing time, place and memories, Block sweeps up the past; like an intergenerational vacuum cleaner, switching on the light and sucking up the dust under the rug.

 “Its not about talent,” his father told him, “its about making a living.  You don’t have to like everything you do, somethings you just do”.

Block had enough of doing things you just do. He became an actor. He didn’t get rich, but he succeeded at it, has a long list of professional credits, and loves it. Although he wonders out loud why he’s not playing a character with other actors in a play, Block is not just another stand up comic, a fisher for jokes, or a bloke playing the game for all its worth. He soaks up memories in a hot tub, one leg dangling out of the tub, in a perpetual state of wonder at the endless variety of human experience.

With broken Yogi Berra Yiddish, Block highlights Uncle Phillip’s many experiences walking the boardwalk, hawking brassieres,  and taking in the sun. His friend Malka Lipman ate too much rich food, had a heart attack then a coronary bypass. “A coronary bypass?” he says astounded. “What is he talking about? It bypassed his stomach and went straight to his heart!”

Taking on the fears of elderly Jews arriving on Ellis Island,  he lines up at the bulletin board with them. Commenting on a list of rooms and jobs set down in a bewildering array of languages, and not knowing where to turn, all he can think about is sleeping on a stretched out canvas cot. That kind of detail gives the performer’s delivery punch.

Jewish humor, like all ethnic humor, is about survival. Dreams lost and found and found again in unexpected places. Much of the humor we see on television today is about switching channels, petty soured relationships,  and making a career. The stuff doesn’t stand up next to hot memories on a buttered roll, nor can it equal the magic of turning yourself around.

Uncle Phillip’s coat took on a life of its own: a coat of many colors. With anything and everything flying out of its pockets, for comic relief yet. “If you got money, you may need honey,” Block says, quoting his uncle. “But if you got honey, you don’t need money”. Whether or not that advice can be accepted by all, it certainly was delivered in an entertaining, illuminating, and constantly touching and funny way.

 

No Blood, No Sweat, No Tears

In the domain of failed productions of classical plays from the modern repertoire, the name of Federico Garcia Lorca frequently appears. Fortunato Pezzimenti, the associate director of the Irish Classical Theatre Company in Buffalo, New York, staged Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” with all available means. Yet he failed to lock in this Spanish tale of the repression of women, lost honor, revenge, and violence. 

Poorly developed relationships, crowded staging, little sense of time and place, shouting substituting for honest passion, and sorority style flamenco dancing did the production in.

What worked was the  director’s choice of a translation of “Blood Wedding” by the Irish poet, Brendon Kennelly. If and when you could hear it. The amplified miked guiter of Mir Ali’s fingering, rather than supporting the language, or unifying the action, drowned the ear. The music was apt, the playing skillful, the acoustics ballistic.

There were a few successful moments worth noting:   

Penitents in black robes carrying a cross opened the play, manuvering their way  down a crowded aisle of mourners.  Raising the cross they telegraphed ominously the fateful events to come. Kelly Meg Brennan effectively sang the aria from Villa Lobo’s “Bachianas Brasileiras”. Her singing established the fierce atmosphere essential to the play; until she was swallowed up in a traffic jam in the center of the arena stage and disappeared.

Suzanne Sturn (the Mother) advised her son well on ways to manuver his way through a prearranged marriage proposal. The Bridegroom (Paul Todaro), however, failed to  listen to his mother – in more ways than one. The scene dissipated into pillow talk.

The Father of the Bride (Philip Knoerzer), though, hit the right note. Negotiating with his future son-in-law, Knoerzer displayed a cunning, property wise attitude towards his daughter’s virtues as a worker. “She is the living image of my wife, with wide hips for child bearing”” he declared, like he was trading a prize cow. Unfortunately the Bride (Kate LoConti) had little feel for the suppressed desire and sensuality necessary to making the role believable. Instead she ran around the stage in a slip, like a teenager in a sit com, whining about her fate. Her lover, Leonardo (Brian Riggs), cruised around the arena stage with high energy, lusting for the bride, ready to steal her away at a moment’s notice. He gave the impression that he was more like a rocker on the prowl for a teeny bopper on MTV, than a lover sweating and scrambling kinetically over the Andulusian hard scrabble earth. A man with a serious itch.

Bess Brown Kregal as the Mother-in-Law, Arlene Clement as the nosy Neighbor, and especially Kathleen Besko Yale as the Servant, gave the play some well timed, genuinely earned laughs. Finally, in the second act, a large puppet like mask of a birthing woman appeared, with red strings attached, pulled,  like blood, in long strands out of the body of the puppet. A theatrical device resonant with the swollen bellies of countless Spanish woman left to rot on their own in the streets, or panting their lives away behind closed doors, barely surviving an oppressive domestic environment gone to seed. The idea was particularly apt, but it was not woven into the play with anything like continuity or cohesiveness.

Lorca was left behind, in a flurry of funeral ashes. A mere shadow of himself, rolling over in his grave. Listening to Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain” might have helped the director get his bearings. There is no substitute for simplicity of expression, honest sensuality, eloquent form, and the vibrant pregnant pause.

© 2001 Ned Bobkoff ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


An Editor’s Note

Scene4 has been online for nearly a year. Much of its publication is in the magazine’s archives on this site. Just click the “archives” button and use the slow but steady Search Engine. With it you can find feature articles, columns, commentaries, plays, notebooks, and a few novelties, all for your reading pleasure and enlightenment. Enjoy! ...as we enjoy bringing it to you.    --AM

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