A wake-up call for a self-reexamination

My wife and I spent last Sunday morning at South Coast Repertory and

emerged as emotionally warmed as we might have from the words of a

pastor who touched us deeply. The secular pastor in this instance was

a playwright named Donald Margulies, and his message was delivered in

a delightful play named “Brooklyn Boy.”

Margulies’ play was part of SCR’s sixth annual two-day Pacific

Playwrights Festival, in which a half-dozen new plays -- all by

well-established playwrights -- were showcased in staged readings or

workshop productions. For eight bucks a session, the public was

invited to sit in on the spawning process of these plays, and that

has to be the biggest bargain of any theatrical season.

We saw a stellar cast do “Brooklyn Boy,” a story about the

discovery trip of a Brooklyn author who had written two esoteric --

and not very successful -- novels and then hit the best-seller list

with an account of his growing up in Brooklyn. The play is done in

six episodes that start and end with his dying father.

Adam Arkin played the author with a kind of bewildered

wistfulness, supported by a highly visible group of award-winning

actors that included Allan Miller, David Paymer, Mimi Lieber, Paula

Newsome and Lauren Ambrose, the young woman from “Six Feet Under.”

Coming out of the theater into the sunlight of a magnificent

California spring day, I was struck by how lucky we are to have

virtually in our back yard the opportunity to see and hear the finest

in performing art, which seems to me the only place we can look for

truth these days. And how often our attention is focused, instead, on

the frequently Neanderthal level of the political tugging and hauling

that goes on in the halls of government of the city that provides a

home for this art.

The minutes spent walking back to the car after an evocative play

are best devoted to the wonder of being moved, and trying to fix

those moments by bringing up once again bits of dialogue that

crackled with honesty and an admixture of pain and humor, which are

never very far apart. I found “Brooklyn Boy” a very funny and a very

serious play.

The Arkin character (author Eric Weiss), at a pinnacle of success,

is on a tour to publicize his best-selling book when he is

sidetracked to visit his ailing father. At each step of the temporary

derailment that follows, he is forced to take a fresh look at the

people in his life and how his relationship with them has changed

while he wasn’t paying proper attention.

There’s a wife he married for the wrong reasons and now deeply

loves who is divorcing him. A close schoolboy friend who represents a

lifestyle that has been out of his view for many years. A

scrupulously honest young woman who shares his bed after a book

signing party. His agent giving him a reality check about Hollywood’s

treatment of the art he created. And his father. Always his father.

Because he is forced to take stock of where he is and how he got

there, what should be a period of triumph is instead devoted to

discovering two painful truths: that the people and events of which

our life is made merit a new and fresh look regularly, as do the

principles and behavior we rejected so firmly and unequivocally in

our youth.

The conversations with his father catch this best -- and hit

closest to home for me.

They brought back vividly three days late in my father’s life when

I drove him from northern Indiana to Miami, where my brother had

found a retirement home for him. In the long silences of that car

trip, it struck me how little I had ever really communicated with my

father on anything other than a superficial basis. Unlike the father

in the play, my father was a kind and generous man who was also

painfully private.

I didn’t know what agony he had gone through when he lost a

prospering business and our home at the beginning of the Depression.

Why we moved every year when I was growing up. What he was feeling

during the long illness of my mother. Why two subsequent business

ventures failed. Why we never spent time with his extended family,

whom I scarcely knew. And so many other matters that affected both of

our lives that I never explored with him.

And so I tried. I tried very hard. I had spent many years in a

business that required me to draw people out in interviews, and I was

pretty good at it. But in those three days, I never laid a glove on

my dad. It was too late to start. He parried questions resolutely,

changed the subject to baseball or politics, and, finally, told me to

cut it out. And so we drove the rest of the way in frequent long

silences, short on talk, but not love.

In the play, Eric’s father appears to him after his death, and

father and son talk honestly and substantively. For the first time,

Eric understands his father’s anger and discomfort with him, and he

says, in agony, “Why couldn’t we have talked when you were alive?”

Why, indeed?

Eric’s father is beyond talk, his wife is gone, and his book is

being castrated by Hollywood. And so, in his despair, he takes a

fresh look at some of the resources he had cast aside in his youth.

And we walk out of the theater into the California sunlight to ponder

what in our lives needs a fresh look.

This is what art can do for us. And it is why I felt so much

gratitude for living in an area where it is so readily accessible. I

won’t wait so long next year to sample more of the readings at the

Pacific Playwrights Festival. And I strongly recommend it to you.

You’ll never find a better investment for eight bucks.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.