“Conversations With My Father,” the new Herb Gardner play, at the Royale, has one of those titles that make you think you know exactly what the play will be like: an old-fashioned bittersweet memory play in which a writer tries to come to terms with a difficult parent by depicting scenes from his childhood and talking to the audience a lot. “Conversations” is a memory play. In the opening scene, a man and his teenage son have come back to the bar the man’s parents ran for fifty years on Canal Street; the man—who is, in fact, a writer (though you don’t find this out until quite late)—does talk to the audience; and his father—the Amanda Wingfield character—is a difficult guy. And there’s no getting around the old-fashioned opening. As the play begins, Charlie (Tony Shalhoub) is waiting for his son, Josh (Tony Gillan), to come down from the old family apartment above the bar. Josh is curious about the place, but Charlie wants to get out of there as quickly as possible. “What’s the hurry?” asks the smart-aleck son. He retreats upstairs, and we get one of those gloriously hokey flashbacks: the lights change and saloon doors open, Judd Hirsch comes out with a tray full of glasses with little American flags stuck in them, and suddenly the year is 1936. Mr. Shalhoub takes a seat in one of the booths and looks on as his father tries to get a two-year-old Charlie to speak.
The setup, the flashback, the struggle between exacting father and recalcitrant child all make you think that the play is heading for some epic confrontation. But “Conversations with My Father” isn’t about coming to terms with people and things so much as about capturing them. Almost nothing in Mr. Gardner’s play is as you’d expect it to be. It’s not phony and sentimental, like “Dancing at Lughnasa,” or phony and self-serving, like “Jake’s Women.” Above all, the play isn’t simplistic, and although it requires a large cast (twelve actors) and a vast elaborate set, you don’t leave the theater with a sense of waste. The set—an evocation of the bar, designed by Tony Walton—is a concrete expression of the contradictions embodied in Eddie, the Judd Hirsch character, whose salient trait is inconsistency: a fondness for the sudden moral about-face, which Charlie as a precocious ten-year-old (David Krumholtz) calls the old “switcheroo.” A survivor of Odessa’s October 1905 pogrom, Eddie wants his sons to go to Hebrew school, but he doesn’t want them to wear their skullcaps on the way or to hear their mother (Gordana Rashovich) speaking Yiddish around the house. In 1936, he’s just changed his name from Itzik Goldberg to Eddie Ross, and he hopes someday to make enough money to open a place uptown.
Of course, Eddie’s dilemma about Jewish history and identity—is one better off nurturing anger or subduing it?—could just as easily be applied to Charlie’s relationship with him, only it never is. That’s what makes Gardner such a good writer and “Conversations With my Father” such a good play. The point about those “conversations”—in so many of which one party is incapable of speech or understanding—isn’t so much what gets said as how the mind works and what it hangs onto. That the play engenders the feeling it does stems partly from Mr. Gardner’s nimble-mindedness and partly from the facility of his director. Daniel Sullivan, whose staging is full of barroom tableaux that O’Neill would have killed for, has elicited notably restrained performances from an ace cast that includes Marilyn Sokol, William Biff McGuire, and Peter Gerety, as denizens of Eddie’s tavern; David Margulies, as a Yiddish actor who boards with the family; John Procaccino and Richard E. Council, as a couple of heavies; and Jason Biggs and Mr. Gillan, as different versions of Charlie’s brother, Joey. Most of them have only the briefest of scenes in which to make an impression, and some of them—like Mr. Shalhoub, Mr. Margulies, and Miss Sokol—have not always been known for their restraint.
Eddie never does move the bar uptown, so the set never really changes. Mr. Hirsch’s wonderful, snarling performance is the play’s other constant (a nice touch, given that his character is meant to stand for inconsistency). Everything else keeps changing, particularly our perspective on the issues the play purports to be about—whether you assimilate or cleave to your heritage, fight back or play it safe, remember or try to forget. If “Conversations With My Father” were a routine or formulaic Broadway play, it would discover that there are no easy answers. But that isn’t something you need to go to the theater to find out. Mr. Gardner is interested in revealing something about the beauty of the questions.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 13, 1992