Arkady Leokum's Enemies (Broadway Theatre Archive) Review

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(More customer reviews)Enemies is a wonderful two character, one-act, 45 minute play from the Kultur Broadway Theatre Archives. The setting is a small restaurant in the Catskills, 1971. The two characters, well into their senior years have encountered one another for five years. Gittleman (Sam Jaffe) is a waiter who has to put up with the demanding, harsh and critical insults of customer Miller (Ned Glass), who makes his frequent visit, as he puts it, to eat before the riff raff comes in.
For five years, Miller criticizes the food, the hygiene, the coffee, the menu, the establishment and the final blow is to refer to Gittleman as a lowly waiter who Miller has had to train! Clearly Gittleman and Miller are not friends. Miller is a widowed man has merely enjoyed the pleasures of life that "discount hours" have brought him, clearly a lonely and less expensive existence. But he flaunts a different lifestyle filled with success and happiness. Gittleman is a hard-working family man.
It is the turn of events that makes this play a gem! The two veteran actors have starred in television and movies for years. Ned Glass is known also for his nasal voice while Sam Jaffe for his wild white hair. The two actors both died in 1984. Arkady Leokum is popular for his Tell Me Why: Answers to Hundreds of Questions Children Ask. If you care to see another great play by him, try Neighbors (Broadway Theatre Archive) ....Rizzo


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Arkady Leokum's short humorous play is based on theauthor's experience as a waiter at a Catskills resort. Sam Jaffe stas as a long-suffering waiter who finally turns the tables on an intolerable regular customer (Ned Glass).

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John Cheever's The Sorrows of Gin (Broadway Theatre Archive) (1979) Review

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(More customer reviews)With an eye for details and an ear for the hollow speech of the upper-middle-class residents of Shady Hill, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein transforms John Cheever's famous short story into a realistic play about the failure to connect. Set primarily inside a suburban home, the play focuses on the lives of the Lawton family--Kip (Edward Herrmann) and Marcia (Sigourney Weaver), for whom the social whirl of cocktail parties and evening martinis has completely subsumed real life, and eight-year-old Amy (Mara Hobel), sad, lonely, and often fobbed off on the household help. The acting is outstanding, with an amazing performance by young Mara Hobel.
Although the Lawtons' household employees come and go, Amy becomes particularly fond of Rosemary, a cook who is as lonely as she is and who reads to her and gives her affection. When Rosemary returns one evening from a trip to the city, drunk, she is instantly fired, in part because she has embarrassed Amy's father in public. Amy, devastated, decides to follow a suggestion Rosemary once made to her--she pours her father's gin down the sink. When Amy continues this practice, her parents assume that the help is stealing it, and they fire a succession of employees. After her father's hot-headed confrontation with a babysitter, Amy decides to run away.
Produced for Public Television in 1979, this Jack Hofsiss-directed play depicts every aspect of the Lawtons' shallow lives. Amy's imitations of her parents' speech and their alcohol-related entertaining are duplicated when she plays with her dolls, and her mother's concern with appearances and her father's constant escape into martinis show the emptiness of their lives and the effects on Amy. Unfortunately, while this realistically depicted subject may have been fresh in the late 1970s, when the story was written, it is now stale and offers little that is new, thematically. The Lawtons are not intrinsically interesting, and their interactions with their daughter, such as they are, do not develop any real dramatic tension.
The intricacy and satire of Cheever's short story are missing here, and the pacing and careful buildup of details, which enhance the themes of Cheever's short story and leave something to the imagination, are sacrificed--everything in the play is obvious from the outset. The good acting, Wasserstein's natural-sounding dialogue, and the accuracy of the sets and costuming do not compensate for the losses that occur when this carefully constructed short story is transferred from the reader's imagination to an in-your-face revelation of family problems by people who do not learn from their experiences. Mary Whipple


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Sigourney Weaver and Edward Herrmann portray an affluent suburban couple whose empty and gin-fueled lives are observed through the eyes of their neglected, eight-year-old daughter in a teleplay adapted by playwright Wendy Wasserstein from John Cheever's short story. The tension and sadness behind the veneer of upper-class life in Shady Hill are at the heart of this insightful drama.

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Sea Marks (Broadway Theatre Archive) (1976) Review

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(More customer reviews)Colm Primrose, a fisherman from the wild coast of Ireland, loves his work, his boat, his fishing buddies, and the sea in all its moods. Living in a small, rural community, he has no telephone, no modern conveniences--and no wife. While at a local wedding, he sees Timothea, a young woman from Liverpool, to whom he eventually writes a letter. Their correspondence, in which he describes his life, continues for eighteen months, before she returns to the area for another wedding. Before long, she has persuaded him to visit her in Liverpool, where she works for a publisher.
Their relationship, the first ever for Colm, provides sweet romance, but the seeds of disaster are sown from the beginning, when Timothea has his letters published as "sonnets." Described by publicists as "primitive," the unschooled Colm finds himself, unexpectedly, a celebrity poet, in demand for talks to clubs. Like the proverbial fish out of water, however, Colm misses the sea and "the heads," while Timothea, who has escaped to Liverpool from rural Wales, wants never to live the primitive life again. Their love, which drives the first act of the play, becomes the conflict which drives the second act.
Gardner McKay has created a romantic drama which glorifies the life of the fisherman and his ties to the most basic elements of wind and weather. The visual contrast between the wild Irish coast in this filmed-for-television production and the seamy side of Liverpool illustrate the themes. The plot is simple--and predictable--but George Hearn manages to make Colm a real person experiencing real agonies as he tries to reconcile his first experience with love with his need to return to his roots. Veronica Castang, as the more experienced lover, plays her role with a lovely softness, which disguises her selfish side, seen in her refusal to consider leaving the city and her determination to persuade Colm to remain.
This Broadway Theatre Archive production from 1976, contains themes as relevant today as they were then--the desire for love, the need for openness to new experiences, and the beauties of the simple life vs. the city life. The attractions of a life as raw and primitive as Colm's may be less appealing today than they were in 1976, however, and the conflict is so basic that the conclusion is obvious from the beginning of the play. Still, Hearn makes Colm such an attractive character that one hopes that he will achieve happiness by finding both a lover and a continued life on the sea he loves. A well-acted romantic drama. n Mary Whipple


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