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by Jim Brochu, directed by Piper Laurie

Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company,

Al Green Theatre, Toronto

March 28-April 16, 2011;

Lia and Dana Matthow, Bathurst Street Theatre, Toronto

February 9-March 11, 2012

“A Funny Man Caught in Serious Times”

In Zero Hour, Jim Brochu gives a phenomenal performance as Zero Mostel.  Not only does he have the bulk, the huge  voice and wild-eyed look of the great comic actor, but Brochu has his habitual gestures and style of delivery down to perfection.  Near the end I found I’d forgotten it wasn’t the real Zero Mostel on stage.  It’s a performance no one should miss.

The one-man play aims to show us the Zero Mostel we don’t know rather than the one we know.  This is a good a decision since most people today likely know Mostel (1915-77) only as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and Max Bialystock The Producers (1968).  As we discover Mostel thought of himself as a painter first and, as a distant second, a comedian and actor.  Brochu, as playwright, imagines that a reporter from the New York Times has come in the last year of Mostel’s life to interview the great man in his studio.  As Mostel sketches away he tells his life story in chronological order.  Since the reporter is invisible and is located somewhere where we are sitting, the conceit is really unnecessary.  Mostel might as well speak to us directly. 

His reminiscences, larded as one might expect from a comic, with large doses of jokes and zingy one-liners, gives way on several occasions (signalled by far too drastic lighting changes) to re-enactments of important scenes from his life--his debut as a comic, his first improvisation in an acting class, his testimony before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955, his first meeting with Jerome Robbins after Robbins had “named names” which led to the suicide of one of Mostel’s best friends.                  

In fact, Mostel’s denunciation of the Hollywood Blacklist and its chilling effects forms the major part of the show and gives it its dramatic heft.  Mostel wonders why, of all professions, HUAC targeted writers and actors and why this targeted group was overwhelmingly Jewish.  He notes that Lucille Ball, a Baptist who had actually signed a membership card for the Communist Party, was not troubled, whereas Jewish artists, like Mostel, had only to be named to lose work for the next ten years.  Mostel says that such persecution with its covert anti-semitic agenda must be remembered or else it will be repeated.  The HUAC hearings have taken on special meaning now that we have seen that the U.S. government is capable of stifling scientific and military reports contrary to its political aims.  Brochu’s play premiered in in Los Angeles in 2006 when the audience would remember both the blacklist and then President George Bush’s declaration in 2001, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.

Thus, Zero Hour is not an inane meet-the-actor play like William Luce’s Barrymore, serving merely as a showcase for a star.  Rather, it can be enjoyed both for Brochu’s amazing re-creation of a beloved comic actor on stage and for reminding audiences that political repression of ideas can occur even in democracies.  We associate Mostel’s comedy with a kind of barely contained hysteria.  Brochu’s play makes clear that Mostel was able to channel into comedy the real anger and fear he felt during his life.

As a great bonus, The Gallery in the Miles Nadal JCC, where the Al Green Theatre is located, his hosting an exhibit of over 40 drawings and paintings by Mostel, works you will certainly want to see after the show. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Jim Brochu as Zero Mostel. ©zerohourshow.com.