THE LOMAN FAMILY PICNIC
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A certain bitterness pervades Margulies’s play, which includes a couple of truly tasteless references to Kristallnacht and how terrible a relative who endured the concentration camps looks at a buffet table. Worse, in his effort to deconstruct the classic image of the American Jewish family, Margulies shows us the underside of sitcom characters instead of real human beings. Clearly a gifted dramatist, Margulies shortchanges his own talent by stooping to stereotypes. The Loman Family Picnic seeks to tell us that there is a lot more going on under the surface of the Jewish family than Neil Simon comedies might lead us to believe. This is not a surprise.
We open with Doris, a Brooklyn mom who’s busy slicing away at her wedding dress to make a Halloween Bride of Frankenstein costume. Doris lives with her schlepp of a husband, Herbie, and her two precocious sons, Stewie and Mitchell. Herbie kvetches about work. Stewie kvetches about Hebrew school and all the nonsense Hebrew words he has to memorize for his bar mitzvah. Doris, subtly kvetching, tells the audience about how happy she is. Meanwhile young Mitchell is working on a creative report for his sixth-grade English class–a loosely autobiographical musical version of Death of a Salesman showing the brighter side of the Lomans’ life.
Some of the performers in Next Theatre’s production are fun to watch. Young actors Timothy Ferrin as Mitchell and Shale Marks as Stewie are certainly talented and entertaining, though I couldn’t help thinking that they’d have more fun going to the park and playing Wiffle ball than staying up on school nights to perform in this flawed play. The best performance, though, comes from Daniel Ruben as Herbie: his frustration and anger give The Loman Family Picnic most of its genuinely human touches. Ruben rises above the stereotypes–something Margulies seems less inclined to do.
