‘Brighton Beach’ makes impact long after curtain fall

by Monica Booker, contributing writer

JMU’s school of theatre and dance has taken on the daunting task of putting on a show where nothing much actually happens. The school’s most recent production, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” follows Neil Simon’s original script from 1982.

Simon published this autobiographical play, which tells the story of a Jewish family in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. The family deals with such issues as teenagers struggling for independence, a father losing his job, a son discovering the joys of puberty and the overall bond a family shares when learning life’s lessons. Uh, so what?

This is the same pulp fiction that has been regurgitated time and time again since the beginning of modern realism in the late-19th century. The funny thing about reality is that not every ending is resolved. Neil Simon takes the theater back a few steps in time by perpetuating stereotypes and creating a script that is solely superficial, albeit, with a few good one-liners.

Now I suppose it is plausible that Neil Simon wrote the play to heighten Jewish stereotypes to show how they hurt basic social advancement. However, the playwright highlights the stereotype and does not delve much further into the characters’ personae. This proposes a daunting task for the director, who has to choose to direct the play showing how canon stereotyping has severely damaged our society or to ignore the scripted stereotypes altogether.

For example, one of Simon’s main characters is a worrisome Jewish mother, played by junior Stephanie Ganacopolis. Overall, Ganacopolis is a good actor stuck with a two-dimensional role. She was physically the most interesting to watch on stage. She played the archetypal Jewish mother well. Mazel tov. But again I go back to questioning why we are seeing stereotypes in the 21st century without negating their validity?

I commend this show for making me leave the audience while questioning its purpose. I still have a series of questions left unanswered about the show’s intended meaning. Not all shows have a post-production effect on its audience.

Perhaps it was a conscious choice for the director, junior Neal Kowalsky to perpetuate these stereotypes and let their presence go unmentioned without any inter-directorial commentary embedded in the show. That way, he would be saying these are common anti-Semitic associations and should be abolished. If Kowalsky intended that, that’s fantastic because I left the show wondering if all Jewish mothers nag their children. I also wonder if all Jewish people live in Brooklyn and “tawlk” with ambiguous New York accents. (It was either a Brooklyn or a Long Island dialect. The cast oscillated between a few of them.) 

It’s true that we still let these stereotypes exist in drama, dating from the big-nosed portrayal of Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” written more than 400 years ago. The play is set in New York, but why the SNL cawfee tawlk? Overall, I’m led to believe that these stereotypes were not highlighted in the show but in fact, ignored. Junior Matt Kagen ad-libbed “oy vey” on several occasions to get a comic chuckle. It was as if the adult characters in the show had to “put on the Jew voice.”

Compared to the TV shows we grew up on, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” has those “Full House” moments where the family sits on the couch and talks about what not to do, and they all learn the moral lesson at the end. Cue theme song and that’s a wrap. Honestly, if this was an episode of “Full House,” I don’t know what the moral lesson is. I thought it would be not stereotyping Jews. Maybe I’m wrong. “Go ahead, tawlk amongst yerselves.”

“Brighton Beach Memoirs” will be showing in Theatre II through Saturday, Oct. 15. The show starts at 8 p.m. nightly with an extra midnight show  Saturday. Tickets will be on sale two hours before curtain for $3.