One Sided Memories

by Ken Satoyoshi

Twice this week I saw plays that reminisce about their family that immigrated to New York City where my family also landed. "Conversations with My Father" spans two plus generations of a Jewish-American family, from the enthusiastic first generation eager to fit in and forsake the old country, to the confused second generation with a foot in each country, to the third generation searching for his roots.

The three-hour long journey begins with the brooding grown son/narrator Charlie as he remembers his father trying to coax something more than ga-ga from the two-year old Charlie in a perambulator. We are immediately introduced to the father's desperate desire to succeed in America whether it be himself and his tavern or through his sons. The bar is the only set of the play and a beautiful one at that. It provides a cross-sectional showcase of the neighborhood characters that does not really advance the plot or theme, except for the boarder Zaretsky so wonderfully portrayed by Irv Ziff. He represents the patriarch's Yiddish conscience that provides Charlie's older brother Joey with the incentive to enlist (underage) to fight the Nazi ethnic cleansing. Unfortunately, the father had bankrolled his New World hopes in Joey, who dies defending against a Kamikaze attack. Now he only has Charlie who failed vocally as an infant but who eventually succeeds verbally as a millionaire writer of books about his father.

The plot is a play of contrasts, love and hate, life and death, European and Pacific theaters of war, New and Old World, silent and verbose, pugilistic and cerebral, religion and atheism. A son who wants to be different from his father in every way, but in the end bullies his own son as he was bullied by his father.

I found "Conversations..." a bit awkward at times, structured more like a series of short monologues, rather than interactive dialog. Then there is the autobiographical coloring of Charlie as a precocious 11-year old, perhaps the result of mid-life embellishment.

The past and present are successfully transitioned in the single set with appropriate lighting and staging. The "Miss Rheingold"-like beauty contest was a nice touch to the scenery.

Randy Messersmith as Charlie (who lacks a New York City accent), Josh Abromovitz as Joey, Adam Mortemore as the young Joey, and Philip Dawkins as the young Charlie, all come alive in their respective "Conversations..." with their father, ably played by Joseph Costa.

It was a heavy evening of drama, but thought provoking and memorable.

Production details:
Conversations with My Father by Herb Gardner
Actors Theatre of Phoenix
Herberger Stage West
252-8497
through 26 May 96

Return to AARO 95-96