James DeVita is a coiled spring of an actor. One of the pleasures of watching him is never being sure when he’s going to explode. In Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Donald Margulies’ Brooklyn Boy, the explosions are subtle and guarded, but it’s a great role for DeVita, nonetheless.
Playing Eric Weiss, a novelist with an uneasy relationship to his past (and his present), DeVita shows the Brooklyn b
oy deeply buried beneath the cool surface of a long-suffering writer who has finally arrived. We first see it in the battle of wills with his dying father, played with great timing and wit by Robert Spenser. The scene has enough wince-inducing punch lines to fill up a Borscht Belt comedy routine (dad complains about his son’s "Today Show" appearance because he “always like Jane Pauly best”). But it also sketches in the troubled core of Weiss’s character.
Through the rest of the play we meet Weiss’s boyhood friend, his estranged wife, and others who have a similarly conflicted take on his success. What emerges is a bittersweet portrait of a man without a home (as Don Shirley termed the play, reviewing its world premiere). As an autobiographical play about a man who writes an autobiographical novel, Brooklyn Boy is steeped in the rueful irony that often surrounds certain brands of the creative process: while the unexamined life isn’t worth living, examining one isn’t always a journey into satisfied enlightenment.
C. Michael Wright is a perfect match for Margulies. As a director, he relishes the telling detail without hitting it with a follow spot. Watch the way DeVita interacts with his father in the early moments of the play – with a heartbreaking blend of sadness and annoyance, perhaps anticipating the bickering that is to come. In the one scene that doesn’t ring true on the page (Margulies lets his disgust for Hollywood get the best of him), Wright doesn’t skimp on the vacuous Hollywood stereotypes (here played by Michelle Lopez-Rios and Darrel Cherney), but uses the shallowness to set off one of the deeply emotional moments of the play.
A rich journey like this wouldn’t be possible without a first rate cast. Here, in addition to those mentioned, it included Julie Swenson, Rebecca Rose Phillips and Tom Klubertanz.
