by Jeff Baron
Directed by Jen Shuber
A Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company
presentation at the Jane Mallett Theatre
January 28-February 18, 2012

            A conventional play where almost everything can be anticipated accurately before it plods its way to an expected conclusion, Visiting Mr. Green has the advantage of a solid, craftsman in the leading role. Theodore Bikel is close to the age of the title character but he never treats the role of the widowed orthodox Jew with any condescension. He does not sugarcoat the stereotypical situations; nor does he overplay their melodrama. Despite the bend in his knees and a fluffy white beard, Bikel is a robust man with a voice capable of booming to the rafters and he allows his physical heft to sometimes dramatically counterpoint Mr. Green’s disagreeable small-mindedness. Living alone in a dusty, cluttered Upper West Side prewar apartment (designed with literal fidelity to realism by Cameron Porteous), he is an angry recluse, bitter about his beloved wife Yetta’s death to cancer two months earlier and (as we subsequently discover) his only daughter’s marriage to a goyim in California. Into his shabby world (of closed blinds, dead flowers, old brown paper bags, crumpled newspapers, and stacks of telephone books) comes a young man knocking loudly at the front door. This turns out to be Ross (a Jewish Yuppie who works for American Express) who is legally forced to pay weekly visits to the widower for having brushed him dangerously with his car. Ross’s punishment of social service first appears to be punishment for Mr. Green as well, despite the younger man’s concern for the dyspeptic old widower’s health and wellbeing.

            The situation set in the manner of a sitcom—the old guy resenting the younger guy’s solicitousness, curiosity, and charity, and responding with cute deadpan one-liners—the play threatens to sink into quaint clichés and some corny jokes in the first act. It is inevitable for a patron to feel that this play is a lesser version of Tuesdays With Morrie, for it repeats that play’s pattern of a younger man tending to an older one out of sympathy and curiosity. Mr.Green has a disconnected telephone, no food in the fridge, an unlocked front door, and no one to assuage his loneliness. Ross brings him kosher food, tidies up the place, and tries to comfort the old man who keeps denying what he is uncomfortable about. There is gentle comedy but the dialogue often sounds like vaudeville or inferior Neil Simon. Besides, much of the surface rings false: why would a New Yorker (even one as much an unyieldingly old-fashioned Jew from the Old World as Green is) not know that American Express is not a train? How did Green survive in his cluttered apartment without much food, anyway? Why is he so alone? Isn’t there another orthodox Jew of Russian ancestry or of his own congregation available in the Upper West Side to minister to him? And why wouldn’t a younger Jew (even one as progressive as Ross) not know about orthodox customs regarding meat and dairy?

            Act Two dispels some of these cavils because it uncovers the source of Green’s phobias and reveals the old man as a sexual and religious bigot. The play now turns preachy. Ross is gay, and to Green this is a bewildering outrage. It is an outrage when the old man adds to the younger one’s humiliation by his angry denunciation, but it is an equal outrage that Green has shunned his own daughter and grandchildren. Yet, in the tidying up manner of a soap opera, Green’s moments of fear and mental confusion are cleared up, Ross and he come to a tender rapprochement, and the old man is ready to answer the next knock on the front door for whatever it will bring him.

            So, there is nothing in this play to really rock the sensibility of anyone except someone who is satisfied with stereotypes and conventional playwriting. Director Jen Shuber guides Bikel and his counter-part Aidan deSalaiz through the clichés, managing only rarely to transcend them. DeSalaiz is a nice foil to Bikel, sometimes perplexed, sometimes infuriated, but generally benevolent. However, it is Bikel who gives an acting lesson in the way he handles props (how lovingly he holds his dead wife’s photograph) and deploys gestures in an unfussy way. In his rage, he could be a Jewish Lear; in his bemused irony, he could be a Tevye. Unfortunately, the script does not allow him to linger long on such heights, but Bikel is able to conjure the haunting demons that magnify his loneliness and paranoia for much of the story.

photos: Racheal McCaig

photo 1 (L-R): Aidan deSalaiz (Ross) and Theodore Bikel (Mr, Green)

pic 2: Theodore Bikel as Mr. Green



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