<b>✭✭</b>✩✩✩
<b>by Steve Solomon, directed by Andy Rogow
Philip Roger Roy, Dana Matthow & Bud Martin, Bathurst Street Theatre, Toronto
October 19, 2011-February 5, 2012
</b>
“Kosher Bologna”
“Does anybody here remember Woodstock? Was anybody here <i>at</i> Woodstock?” So asks actor Paul Kreppel playing author Steve Solomon in Solomon’s solo show <i>My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy! </i> This question like the subsequent one about remembering “mood rings” (invented in 1975) gives a pretty clear indication as to the show’s target audience. Amiable and innocuous, the humour in <i>Therapy</i> is definitely geriatric both in content and style.
The play is set in the waiting room of Steve’s therapist. He’s running late so Steve starts to tell us--Are we other clients waiting with him?--about his wacky family that has driven him seek help for his anger management problems. What follows is not Steve’s life story or any kind of narrative but rather a series of one-liners and one-two punch jokes about coping with parents and relatives in general, especially those who are advanced in years. To make things worse what he finds particularly funny are digestive problems, flatulence and incontinence
Steve’s father, Louie, may have been from a Russian-Jewish family that emigrated to the US, and Louie may have fought in World War II and brought home Steve’s mother Marie as his bride, but despite the title, nothing more specific about either parent or their relationship is revealed. Marie is just a stereotype of an Italian mother stirring pasta sauce, and Louie is just a stereotype of a Jewish father kvetching about his wife and son. One might have thought there was an interesting story here, but the ethnicity of Steve’s parents serves only to elicit a stream of generic jokes about Italians and Jews. We hear how Steve’s bubbe tries to explain what kosher is to Marie--veal parmigiana is a no go--but we never hear whether she actually does change her style of cooking or not. We hear that Marie and Louie argue about religion, but we never hear what the result is or how it affects Steve.
Solomon unfortunately is so fixated on keeping the show fluffy he always goes for a joke rather than looking even superficially at the topics he raises. The result is that the whole therapy premise makes no sense. His view is so generic that his family is no more weird for being half Italian and half Jewish than any other family. If having elderly parents with hearing aid problems were a criterion for therapy, then everyone lucky enough to have elderly parents would need it.
The action supposedly is set in the present but in fact is quite dated. Steve claims to be 55 in the play (Kreppel is 64) and Woodstock happened in 1969. Therefore, Steve was a rather unlikely 13 years old when he attended and met and married his first wife. It’s time for Solomon to revise the character’s age upwards, to omit the Woodstock reference altogether or to make clear that the setting for the play is not in the present. Steve tells us he’s just heard that the airlines are now charging for food. Well, that began in 2003. That along with the airport security jokes are way past stale.
You feel for actor Paul Kreppel assigned to make this would-be laugh-riot work. He has an engaging personality and is able to keep the 60 plus different voices distinct that the script requires, including the sounds of various animals. Still, someone should have notified Solomon that Toronto audiences will likely not find imitations of Indian music and Pakistani taxi drivers with broken English quite as hilarious as New Yorkers do. Since <i>Therapy</i> is so much more like a stand-up comedy routine than a play, it would be good if Kreppel were allowed to depart from the script more frequently.
Nevertheless, there must be an audience for this kind of pap. <i>Therapy</i> played almost two years on Broadway and has toured to more than 100 cities and is still touring. Its success spurred Solomon to write two sequels. Yet, here in such a culturally diverse city as Toronto, where multi-ethnic families are not unusual, a play like <i>Therapy</i> seems to come from another time and place--from a very old-fashioned mindset that still considers ethnic stereotypes funny and where “50-year-olds” make fun of seniors without acknowledging that it’s really the fear of their own future that troubles them.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Paul Kreppel as Steve. ©2007 broadwayworld.com.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.italianjewish.ca/">www.italianjewish.ca</a>.
<b>2011-10-20</b>
<b>My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy!</b>