Donald Margulies’s Brooklyn Boy, which is receiving a creditable Boston premiere production from SpeakEasy Stage Company (at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion through April 1), chronicles the identity crisis of Eric Weiss (Victor Warren), a Jewish writer from Sheepshead Bay now rounding middle age. His third novel — the first drawing on material from his Brooklyn childhood — has made him newly famous and has been optioned by a Hollywood studio that’s invited him to adapt the screenplay. But his wife (Debra Wise) wants a divorce, and his father (David Kristin), a difficult, undemonstrative man, is dying. The play is structured as a series of encounters Weiss has with people who, in one way or another, challenge him to speak up for his Brooklyn-Jewish legacy or throw it over, and since Margulies is a conventional playwright, we know long before Eric seems to how he’ll decide. The sentimental curtain line is hardly a surprise.
The issues the play handles are familiar from fiction (Philip Roth) and movies (Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village, among others), and Margulies does little to vary them. But banality, which isn’t the worst flaw in a (mostly) naturalistic drama, isn’t as much a problem here as the insufficiency of dramatic imagination. Of the six characters who interact with Eric, only the irascible, tenacious old papa and Ira Zimmer (Ken Baltin), the childhood pal he meets in the cafeteria of the hospital where their parents are ensconced, have been fleshed out. Wife Nina is less a character than a series of positions, and though Wise works hard, there’s nothing in the material to galvanize them. We never get a glimpse of what drew these two people together in the first place, or why he’s striving so hard to keep her from walking away, unless it’s just that he can’t conceive any other way of living his life. In the second act, Eric flies out to Hollywood on a book tour and picks up a UCLA undergrad (Joy Lamberton) who comes to hear him read; then he takes a meeting with a producer (Ellen Colton) to get notes on his screenplay and a hot young TV star (Brad Smith) eager to play the lead. These scenes are burlesques, so over the top — especially the studio meeting — that they seem to exist only to remind us that the Brooklyn boy has no business traveling so far from home. Lamberton plays against caricature as much as she can, and though you may not be able to make sense of her role, at least she stays with you. I didn’t buy the other two West Coast representatives for an instant.
As for Eric, never having read the play or seen any other production, I couldn’t determine how much of the problem with the character is in the writing and how much is the result of errors by Warren and director Adam Zahler. He’s notably lacking in warmth, except when he’s fighting to get Nina to take him back. Yes, the play is about a man who has imposed an emotional distance between himself and his past, but he’s also just written an autobiographical novel, and his interactions with Ira and the college student, Alison, would be more complex and interesting if he didn’t come across as so damn unyielding — if he fought his own impulses more rather than closing down so early and then closing down over and over again. Ira is such a wonderful character — and Baltin gives such a marvelous performance — that he winds up telling on Eric in ways that Margulies probably didn’t intend. This man wears all his feelings on his sleeve: tremulous delight at seeing Eric again, anger and jealousy over his abandonment, resentment at the way his own life has turned out, pride at being associated with a famous writer and his popular book, authentic concern over his friend’s problems. He pushes himself onto Eric; he’s too much — you certainly understand why Eric turns down his invitation to Shabbas dinner. But if Eric found it harder to resist the cozy flavor of home Ira holds out, I think I’d have more feeling for him than I did.
At least Brooklyn Boy has characters you can debate about. Bill W. and Dr. Bob, at the New Repertory Theatre’s new Arsenal Center digs (through March 26), has mouthpieces. This play by the husband-and-wife team of Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey dramatizes the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid 1930s, when Bill Wilson (Robert Krakovski), a New York stockbroker struggling to hold onto his recent sobriety, joins forces with Bob Smith (Patrick Husted), an Akron doctor who’s battled every attempt of his wife and her church friends to get him on the wagon. Except that Bergman and Surrey don’t dramatize the story; they just lay it out, in a series of episodes that make their obvious points and then keep going.
