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A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review
Coney Island Christmas
By Jon Magaril
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"You're a girl, for God's sake! A Jewish girl! What business
does a Jewish girl have being Jesus Christ?” —
Mrs Abramowitz to her daughter Shirley
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Annabelle Gurwitch, Arye Gross, Isabella Acres (Photo: Michael Lamont)
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The Christmas show is increasingly a staple of the typical regional theater season. South Coast Rep has been performing A Christmas Carol for 33 years. The Old Globe is currently presenting How the Grinch Stole Christmas for the fifteenth time. Now the Geffen is getting in on the yuletide act.
They've commendably commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies to create a new play. Even better, his inspired choice of source material jibes perfectly with his interests and those of the theater's subscribers. Coney Island Christmas is an adaptation of Grace Paley's lovely short story "The Loudest Voice," set in Depression-era Brooklyn.
Twelve-year-old Shirley (Isabella Acres), the American born daughter of Jewish immigrants Misha (Arye Gross) and Clara Abramowitz (Annabelle Gurwich), discovers she has a speciality. She can speak louder than everyone else in her eighth grade class.
When Shirley lands the lead in the school Christmas pageant, her mother forbids it. It's a time to celebrate Jewish holidays, not the Nativity. The choice of role causes even more concern. Shirley's cast as the narrator, the adult Jesus. But she refuses to bow out.
Margulies smartly recognizes that the milieu of school pageants offers a chance to satirize and celebrate that entertainment mainstay of most communities. It's one of the few performance genres not to be over-exploited as the framework or subject matter of a new work. Margulies and director Bart DeLorenzo squeeze a bounty of warm-hearted humor from this paragon of amateur theatrics.
They have more difficulty developing the story's themes. This is a bit baffling, since most are central to Margulies' other works. He focuses regularly on the fraught relationships between parents and children, the artist and society, one's heritage and the culture at large. As if that weren't enough, he grew up in the play's Coney Island neighborhood and has featured it in such plays as Brooklyn Boy and The Loman Family Picnic. Yet when the production gets off school grounds, it loses its moorings.
Margulies supplies a new framing device. A ninety-year old Shirley (Angela Paton), now an Angeleno, checks in on her great- granddaughter Clara (Grace Kaufman), who's home sick from school. Sensing that the twelve-year-old is afraid of performing in her Christmas play, Shirley takes her on a journey back to the scene of her own childhood and her own pageant.
Paton and Kaufman are charming, but there's no urgency, comic or dramatic, in the set-up. Young Clara has no strong opinion, positive or negative, about acting in the school play. Margulies provides them with his usual perceptive dialogue — to wit, Shirley's “Once upon a time, I was young, too, you know. . . None of this crinkly, wrinkly stuff. The girl inside me never got old. Only the wrapping paper.” But the running commentary adds little energy or interest and seems born out of a fear that a local family audience of non-New Yorkers needs their hand held to get them to enter into the specific world of the play.
Director DeLorenzo doesn't help matters much. The transition to the past is not particularly transporting. Though the cast is sumptuously large, just a few off-stage voices chime in as Coney Island hawkers. And the bland set is literally and figuratively flat. Scenic designer Takeshi Kata, who's been doing beautiful work at the Taper with November and Other Desert Cities, seems stuck between the ideas of old amusement ride production design and a simple theater design that can be stored easily for return performances years hence. Whatever the reason, we're already a bit bored by the time we hit the old boardwalk.
A bigger issue is that we never understand the source of Shirley's commitment to the play. We don't discover whether she's getting in touch with her inner voice or just loud. What's worse, the argument against young Shirley's involvement in the Christmas play carries little weight. The world of the school is portrayed with warm gusto and observant detail. By contrast, Shirley's bonds to her mother, her religion and her culture are underdeveloped.
Annabelle Gurwitch admirably avoids portraying Mrs. Abramowitz as a nay-saying shrew. It would be an easy choice, since she says nay a lot. She wants Shirley to quiet down, to be more useful, not to stay out so much. The most persuasive approach to the character would be to portray her as an old-world figure fearful of the melting pot and an American-born daughter eager to dive in. But Gurwitch, so adept at naturalistic humor, doesn't seem in any way to be from the old country. Instead she just seems small-minded. This doesn't exactly raise any dramatic stakes.
The casting of Shirley's classmates is problematic as well. The talented actors all seem five to ten years older than the age-appropriate and altogether wonderful Acres. Perhaps the creators were concerned we'd have mixed feelings laughing at young actors playing untalented children. If the other students were supposedly from higher grades, we could buy the age gap. Still, I'd hate to be denied the hilarious performance of Kira Sternbach as Shirley's best friend Evie.
It falls to Arye Gross as Misha to provide some much-needed authenticity. Over the past two decades, Gross has mostly played average men. Within his bailiwick thought, he's exhibited a wide range. Whether murderous or amorous, he's been unfailingly believable. Gross extends his streak here. He's every inch the loving patriarch of a lower-middle class Jewish family at that time and place.
As it stands, this gentle comedy comes off as too genteel. But with just a bit more of Gross' kind of credibility, Coney Island Christmas could fulfill its promise as a seasonal favorite.
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Coney Island Christmas Written by Donald Margulies Based on the short story “The Loudest Voice” by Grace Paley Directed by Bart DeLorenzo Cast: Isabelle Acres as Young Shirley, Maya Erskine as Anna Ling, Julian Evans as Henry Brown, Joe Gillette as Ira Pushkov, Arye Gross as Mr. Abramowitz, Annabelle Gurwitch as Mrs. Abramowitz, Lilly Holleman as Miss Glace, Grace Kaufman as Clara, Angela Paton as Shirley Abramowitz, John Sloan as Mr. Hilton, Kyra Sternbach as Evie Slotnick, Andrew Walke as Jackie Sauerfeld and Elitia Daniels, Ty Freedman, Stephanie Grant, Rachel Hirshee, Sequoia Houston, Jim Kane, Richard Realivasquez, and Eileen T'Kaye as the Ensemble Scenic Design by Takeshi Kata Costume Design by Ann Closs-Farley Lighting Design by Lap Chi Chu Original Music and Sound Design by John Ballinger Production Stage Manager: Jill Gold Running Time: 95 minutes with no intermission Runs: Tuesdays thru Sundays until December 30, 2012 at the Geffen Playhouse 10886 Le Conte Avenue Los Angeles, California 90024 (310) 208-5454 geffenplayhouse.com Reviewed by Jon Magaril |
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