BWW Reviews: Ari Roth's ANDY AND THE SHADOWS Launches Theatre J's Locally Grown Festival

Set on a moving scaffold of a stage filled with sharp lines and empty space, Ari Roth's ANDY AND The Shadows launches Year 2 of Theatre J's exciting initiative, Locally Grown: Community Supported Art Festival. The stage has a roof but no house, doorways but no walls, stairs but no banisters. There are crisp squares of light, and many shadows. Protagonist Andy Glickstein searches frantically for what is behind those shadows, and over the course of 2 1/2 hours, director Daniella Topol and Theatre J's pristine company present a very darkly funny production of playwright Ari Roth's semi-autobiographical, 25-years-in-the-making seminal work.

The son of two child Holocaust survivors, Andy--the lone son in a tight-knit family with two sisters--is haunted by the moral scale of his parents' lives in comparison to his own. Andy's quest for epic narrative consumes him. He is a young man recently engaged to marry Sarah Liebman, a beautiful, accomplished young woman, the daughter of an absent diplomat father and dysfunctional mother, yet Andy's disdain for bourgeois married conventionally has him in an almost palpable choke hold. Much to the consternation of his fiancée, he is determined not to marry until he finds his own Hemingway-esque duende-that mysterious dark force that inhabits great, passionate art, as so eloquently described by Spain's martyred poetic master, Gabriel Garcia Lorca before he was murdered by Franco's Fascist regime. "Duende," wrote Lorca, "is a power or a demon that cannot be summoned at will, but when it arrives its force is irresistible-for it is what drives a creation."

Andy's parents, despite the towering tragedy of their lives, have--much to Andy's distress--embraced the manifold small happinesses of family stability. After meeting in the newly formed Israel after the war, they wed and have raised him and his two sisters in a successful, two-parent family that, as Andy's fiancée Sarah points out, even sings together after dinner.

Yet, this is a family that seems intent on misunderstanding each other. Indeed, Andy, played with frenetic intensity by Alexander Strain, takes the art of the interruption to dizzying heights. Witnessing the manic relentlessness with which he pursues the untold/unremembered fragments of his family's story is positively exhausting; again and again he prods his mother or his father for details to fill in the gaps of their traumatized pasts, and then, not waiting for an answer, rushes on to another fragment, peppering his harangue all the while with witty one-liners.

Andy's angst seems to belie his mother's proclamation: "You are the healer in this family," she tells Andy early in the play. "It is a wounded family." It is a wounded family indeed, and playwright Roth uses a cascade of storytelling techniques-from flashbacks, to flashforwards, visions and interviews and an ill-fated "play, aka screenplay, within a play"-to get at the subtexts of this family through the ever-present medium of dark comedy.

The second act begins with Andy's madcap remake of a Kirk Douglas B-movie, CAST A GIANT SHADOW, with Andy's mild-mannered father, Nate Glickstein, caricatured as an Israeli soldier-hero. It is a choice Andy seemingly comes to by impulse, like some random manic decision made in a sleep-deprived, caffeine-filled frenzy. The choice is intentionally cartoonish--a simplistic, carnivalesque good guy/bad guy rendering of the wrenching Israel/Palestine conflict that Andy has seized upon to finally retell his family's story.

I found it a confusing, disjointed choice. Granted, Andy is neurotically obsessed (which is fodder for much humor) with unraveling his family history while eschewing, as playwright Roth states, "a reverential play about the holocaust" And yes, Andy is smitten with pop culture iconography, as evidenced by his comic, down-with-his-homies exchange with the African American sales clerk at a South Side record store. And yes, Andy is desperate to unburden himself of this weighty mythic tale apparently by any means necessary.

But still, this flip movie/play within a play seems unworthy of playwright Roth's 25-year journey to craft this play.

Is playwright Ari Roth inferring that Andy has gone off the deep end into some manic, bipolar goofball zone? Is it a nod to Chekhov's THE SEAGULL in which the folly of Konstantin Treplyov's (also the only son of a powerful mother) theatrical aspirations are revealed? Is it Hamlet's melodramatic play within a play that speaks a truth only Shakespeare's clowns can utter? Are we to surmise that Andy's film-making aspirations are laughable and, he should just get on with the business of growing up, getting married, having children who then grow up, get married, and so on?

In a further improbable plot twist, Andy is jailed overnight for unauthorized assembly for the filming of his movie in a synagogue parking lot. Nevertheless, the experience brings the moment to its crisis.

Fortunately, Roth then sheds the B-movie high-jinks and has Andy envision a cathartic, crescendoing conversation with his mother. In a riveting scene pulsing with duende, Andy's mother Raya, exquisitely played by Jennifer Mendenhall, finally succumbs to her son's persistence and reveals a desperate, long-suppressed truth of her seven-year-old self who survived the Holocaust hidden in a convent disguised as an angelic Catholic girl. In this moment onstage, the crushing burden, the duende, of Raya's life crystallizes before us. This, we realize, is what Andy has been seeking his whole life-the unbearable flaw of his family's truth.

The fragments of backstory we have been gathering all evening finally galvanize as the play quickly moves toward its denouement. Near the end of the play Andy's mother Raya repeats her declaration that Andy is the healer in their family once Andy--through all his ravings and mutterings, through his confrontations of his weary-hearted father and projected conversations with his memory-suppressing mother-has finally brought the terrible secret of their survival full circle.

Director Daniella Topol has woven a tight and versatile ensemble cast who fluidly embody the Glickstein family and a host of other incidental characters.

In a marathon of urgency, Strain gives Andy's relentlessness a full court press throughout the play. Mendenhall's Raya is a study in contrasts, a petite, powerhouse of a woman who manages her family's goings and comings with steely resolve. As Andy's father Stephen Patrick Martin brings a resonant quiet to this complex character. Played with understated grace, his Nate offers respite from the familial storm. As Andy's fiancée Sarah, Veronica del Cerro brings intelligence, reason, and emotional wholeness both to the role and to the Glickstein family in general, and one hopes much that Andy has the good sense not to let her slip away.

Andy's sister Amy, who recently returned from military service in Israel, is played with sleek panache and confidence by Colleen Delany. Doubling as an angelic, white-winged personification of their mother as a young girl, she gives that role an airy innocence that deepens much our understanding of Raya Glickstein. Andy's other sister, Tammy, declaring that there are other Holocausts, is bound for humanitarian work in Thailand. Played with quirky wit and warmth, Kimberly Gilbert fills the role of Tammy with humor and perspective. In one of the play's most lucid, well-played scenes, the three siblings talk calmy, fleshing out the fragments of family stories as the sisters drive a protesting, fiancée-bound Andy to the cardiac unit instead for a heart-to-heart with their just-hospitalized father.

Rounding out the cast are Davis Hasty and Michael Claybourne, who play Andy's childhood friends, Jerry and James, respectively. Imbuing his character with comic sensibility, Hasty's sweet-faced Jerry asks "How would you like to be the only member of your family not named after Christ?" Claybourne gives himself fully to his multiple roles, be it James or the record store sales clerk or the thankless B-movie role as a Palestinian sniper.

Scenic Designer Luciana Stecconi has created a wonderfully clever and versatile set, complete with nesting set pieces that transition from a dining room table to a bed to a tub, as well as a magical cabinet that literally glows with Andy's father's homemade jellies. The crisp, clean lighting design by Colin K. Bills neatly delineated space and created an instance sense of place. Sound design by Eric Shimelonis provided a seamless and rich audio texture; costumes by Ivania Stack subtly established both place, era, and character; and spare, precise props by Samina Vieth underscored the Glickstein family's ordered existence.

A polished and witty production, ANDY AND The Shadows, clearly delighted the opening night audience. Notably, Theatre J Artistic Director Ari Roth's first incarnation of the script in 1987, then entitled Gentle Falls a Giant Shadow, won the Helen Eisner Award for Young Playwrights sponsored by the Streisand Center for Jewish Culture at UCLA Hillel. It has subsequently received extensive workshop development at several theatres/theatre organizations in Chicago, LA, New York and DC.

Playing April 3-May 5, 2013, at Theatre J, 1529 Sixteenth Street, NW, Washington, DC. Running time: Approximately 2 ½ hours including one 15-minute Intermission. For tickets call 800-494-TIXS; for information call 202-777-3230 or visit theatrej.org.

Photo credit: Stan Barouh

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