A Family Trapped in Comic Tragedy

There’s an old joke that goes like this: My parents moved when I was a kid. They never told me where.

Donald Margulies dramatizes that joke in “The Model Apartment,” a deeply disturbing comedy that director Mark Rucker wrangles with at the La Jolla Playhouse. The play, first produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1988, remains stubbornly problematic--for much of the evening, its brazen comedy rings hollow in a futureless setting.

Max (George Coe) and Lola (Rosemary Prinz) have fled Brooklyn and arrive at a Florida retirement community late at night. He’s a bit stern, while she’s more buoyant. They’re a sweet couple--they cheer each other up, they make love. They retain traces of a German accent and Lola has a number on her arm from her days in Bergen-Belsen.

Their own condo isn’t ready yet so they spend their first night in the model apartment. Initially, the place seems to offer everything they might need but they soon discover the television is a fake, the refrigerator doesn’t work and the ashtray is glued to the glass-and-chrome end table. Much like their lives, the condo has the trappings of comfort but those trappings are a sham, leaving each person to handle his own psychic discomfort as best he can.

Once they get settled, Lola assures Max “she’s not going to find us.” “She” is not some psychotic stalker. “She” is a specific psychotic stalker--their mentally disturbed daughter, Debby (Roberta Wallach). Debby finds them all too quickly, that same night. She is obese, frighteningly high-spirited, inappropriate with her body and very angry. She is the repository of all of her parents’ stories of surviving the Holocaust. In her dementia she spits their stories back at them all jumbled up with her own cultural references so that, in her dreams, Col. Klink, played by Hugh Downs, takes her to a concentration camp.

Margulies’ unusual, slightly surrealistic comic voice works hard to leaven these relationships, to allow us to look closely at a painful situation. But it has worked better in less hopeless surroundings. In his “The Loman Family Picnic,” for instance, a depressing scenario in which a father is so hard up that he takes his son’s bar mitzvah money is interrupted by a cheerful musical number, as imagined by the man’s younger son. But in that play, one can imagine a life for the sons outside of, and after, the scenes we are watching.

In “The Model Apartment,” we get the sense we are at the end of the line. There’s something deeply unfunny about watching a pair of elderly Holocaust survivors look on horrified as their daughter has sex with her homeless boyfriend who has just broken into their condominium where they have come for a little peace at the end of the day. Rucker stages the scene like a comedy, as the play dictates. But here, and elsewhere, Margulies’ subject remains ungiving even as he prods it with his comedy.

Rucker oversees consistently good performances, which help anchor us. Coe and Prinz are a believable loving, fragile couple. As Debby’s likewise mentally unstable boyfriend, Akili Prince shows how his character anxiously monitors what’s going on emotionally with the other people in the room. In the pivotal role, Wallach seems at times truly touched by madness, her black eyes flashing irrationality. Still, despite a valiant performance from Wallach, Debby’s disabilities seem peculiarly contrived. She cannot drink without spilling milk down her blouse; she practically needs to be fed. But she has a large vocabulary, which she uses correctly, knows a fair amount of history and can sing songs from “West Side Story.” She is more of a conceit than a character.

There are moments when one senses a less strained play floating inside this one. In his mind, Max has conversations with another daughter, also named Deborah (also played by Wallach), who was lost as a baby in the Holocaust. Often these conversations, in half-Yiddish, half-English, seem to have no point beyond underlining the fact that Max is haunted. But in the final scene, Margulies transforms this relationship into real poetry. Max, finally relaxing, lies in the sun (Christopher Acebo’s set opens up nicely) and listens to his grown-up, non-demented daughter from another time speak to him of a Seder where all of the relatives he lost are staying up late into the night, arguing. This is an inexorably sad and sweet image of tranquillity that stands at the doorway of death itself. And, unlike in much of the “The Model Apartment,” Margulies gets the tone exactly right.

* “The Model Apartment,” La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 24. $21-$39. (619) 550-1010. Running time: 90 minutes.

George Coe: Max

Rosemary Prinz: Lola

Roberta Wallach: Debby/Deborah

Akili Prince: Neil

A La Jolla Playhouse production. By Donald Margulies. Directed by Mark Rucker. Sets Christopher Acebo. Costumes Katherine Roth. Lights Blake Burba. Music and sound Nathan Birnbaum. Stage manager Narda Alcorn.