THEATER REVIEW : ‘Conversations’ Sometimes Too Rich With Talk

The adage that plays that read well don’t necessarily play well is painfully real in Herb Gardner’s “Conversations With My Father,” the Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson’s first production of the 1993-94 season at the James A. Doolittle Theatre.

This has more to do with form than content, which encompasses some of Gardner’s richest writing to date. True to its title, “Conversations” is a barroom play in which most of the action is talk. It focuses on the mile-a-minute verbosity of its irascible protagonist, a bar owner named Eddie Ross, ne Goldberg, whose demons make life with father a protracted battleground for sons Joey and Charlie. Especially Charlie.

Charlie is our guide on this flashback tour of a rambunctiously dysfunctional Jewish family coping with assimilation, the Great Depression and World War II.

On the personal scale, it’s a struggle to get by in this cavernous Canal Street establishment that Eddie periodically renames and reinvents according to the mood and fashion of the time.

(Pat Collins lit and Tony Walton designed the richly detailed, high-ceilinged and inhospitable environment, in which the traditional-Jewish/contemporary-American contents of a signal jukebox typify the rest of the culture clash.)

The family lives upstairs and marches to the patriarchal sound of Eddie’s fury. He’s a radical assimilationist and fringe Jew, to the point of renaming the Yiddish food prepared by wife Gusta (Gordana Rashovich) to suit whatever identity the bar happens to have that month. This is America. He also insists that his sons attend Hebrew school, while he himself pays only lip service to religion.

Eddie’s cultural ambivalence is continually called into question by Zaretsky (John Colicos), the fading Yiddish actor who rents a room upstairs, and challenged by both sons, though, in the end, it is Charlie who resists the hardest and gives as good as he gets.

These are not happy campers, and the graphic portrait of this gruff, overbearing man is thankfully real and unpretty. Too real? The play’s action is mostly words, funny and tough and stirring, that pit Eddie against his boys, his spouse, his regulars, the local Mafia, Zaretsky and even himself.

Like the Los Angeles Festival that just ended, “Conversations” is focused on home, place and cultural memory. But like August Wilson’s garrulous “Two Trains Running,” and even Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” it suffers from the confines of its locale where talk is always the main event.

Fascinating, muscular, fast-moving talk, especially as directed by Daniel Sullivan and as played by the towering Judd Hirsch. His Eddie is so vivid and oversized, so willing to defy the extortionist Jimmy Scalso (an excellent John Procacino, re-creating his Broadway role), defend the wife he just as often verbally attacks, and spar honestly with sons that he mostly admonishes, that it is easy to see why he won a Tony for the role.

Eddie is a complicated man with redeeming but unromanticized features, whose semi-denial of his Jewishness is only the expedient response to cultural maladjustment. It is easier to admire the man’s gumption than to like him.

And that’s exactly what son Charlie, our guide in this reminiscence, does. At gut level the memory of this turbulent father is unbearable; intellectually, he has to forgive him his trespasses. James Sutorius’ Charlie is dignified, saddled though he is with a shadowy central role played mostly on the sidelines.

Colicos puts more emphasis on Zaretsky’s outward flourish than his inner strength, which tends to diminish him as the conscience of record. Rashovich’s appealing simplicity, on the other hand, ennobles her addled Gusta, a woman righteously clinging to her cultural past in spite of the slings and onslaughts of her husband’s present.

But it’s the stunning vigor and intensity of J. D. Daniels’ Young Charlie that steals the show in a sizzling Act II confrontation with his dad that should go down in dramatic literature as one of theater’s great electrifying moments.

Would that the rest of this extraordinary piece had more scenes like it and held our attention in as undivided a way. Despite Sullivan’s best efforts to keep the language flowing, one often drowns in the sheer muchness of it.

A final point: You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate the universality of “Conversations’ ” complex problems. But like food remembered from childhood, it does help to be Jewish to fully savor the subtlety of its cultural nuance and the specific focus of its thrust.

* “Conversations With My Father,” UCLA James A. Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sunday, Oct. 24, 31, Nov. 7, 7 p.m.; Nov. 22, 8 p.m.; Nov. 11, 18, Dec. 2, 9, 16, 2 p.m.; Dark Nov. 25; Nov. 26, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 19. $15-$46; (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes.

James Sutorius: Charlie

Tony Gillan: Josh/Joey

Judd Hirsch: Eddie Goldberg

Gordana Rashovich: Gusta

John Colicos: Zaretsky

Benny Grant: Young Joey

Gloria Dorson: Hannah di Blindeh

Nick William: Biff McGuire

Jake Dengel: Finney the Book

John Procacino: Jimmy Scalso

William Lucking: Blue

J. D. Daniels: Young Charlie

A Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre presentation in association with James Walsh. Original producer the Seattle Repertory Company. Director Daniel Sullivan. Playwright Herb Gardner. Set Tony Walton. Lighting Pat Collins. Costumes Robert Wojewodski. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Warren Crane. Stage manager Elsbeth M. Collins.