Morning Star
By Adam Langer
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In both cases, the stories behind the plays are considerably more engaging than the plays themselves. The 91-year-old Regan, who recently finished her first novel, was a childhood friend of Clifford Odets, the playwright whose work Regan’s most closely resembles. The 1940 Broadway premiere of Morning Star, partly inspired by a tragic 1911 factory fire that killed over a hundred New York seamstresses, featured the legendary Yiddish actress Molly Picon and a very young Sidney Lumet as a boy about to be bar mitzvahed. Baitz’s Mizlansky/Zilinsky or Schmucks, which treats Jewish issues from a very different perspective, is an early comic work by the talented author of the dramas The Substance of Fire, A Fair Country, and Three Hotels; after recently undergoing open heart surgery, he reportedly reworked the play considerably.
With the exception of the shocking end of the first act, when a blaze at a nearby factory lays waste the optimism of this nobly struggling immigrant family, there are few detours from the typical American melodrama. Regan’s is the sort of play in which the greatest tragedies occur on the eve of a wedding shortly after someone says, “We know only good can come to us here,” in which a character goes into labor at precisely the moment that World War I ends, in which characters make such self-consciously facile pronouncements as “Movies are a novelty–there’s no future in them,” and in which a Bolshevik sympathizer’s present to a bar mitzvah boy is of course a copy of Das Kapital. In the play’s improbable final scene, one couple breaks up, one couple reconciles, another couple gets engaged, and a character announces that he has one year to live–all on the eve of a bar mitzvah. As my West Rogers Park family would say, “Oy, please.”
Director Amy Morton stages the play’s high jinks as if this were raucous comedy, but the laughs are few and far between, most of them cheap yuks at such easy targets as Hollywood eating habits (Mizlansky is partial to chopped Chinese chicken tostadas), ridiculous movie projects (one character talks up Arnold Schwarzenegger for a new adaptation of The Golem), bad regional theater (Lionel has won acclaim for his portrayal of Prospero in Oregon’s “Bardathon”), and porn movie titles (Mizlansky suggests “The Vacuum in the Tuna”). Some of the best moments belong to Andy Rothenberg as Mizlansky’s bitchy houseboy, who consistently undermines his boss’s nefarious schemes.
