Theatre Review —

A Perfect New Path For Stiller

And Meara

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — If you hear the names Stiller and Meara after the name of a play, you know it’s got to be funny. Ever since the Sixties when they endeared themselves to radio audiences with their commercials for Blue Nun Wine and a succession of forgotten savings banks, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara have been famous for their ability to capture the droller nuances of male-female relationships in a 30-second dramatic dialogue.

Now Long Wharf is presenting a full-length play, Down The Garden Path, by Ms Meara (in which her husband, Mr Stiller appears only in videotaped interviews) which purports to have philosophical and metaphysical undertones. Does it work? Well, pretty much near. Performances continue only through February 20.

Down The Garden Path is the portrait of the Garden family, a rather dysfunctional group consisting of Sid Garden and Stella Dempsey, a Jewish-Irish comedy team; their middle-aged son Arthur; his siblings and their spouses and children. The dialogue is crisp and funny, but, as in those old radio commercials, the things people say to each other are weighted down with baggage, packed with jealousy, resentment, guilt and denial. These overtones resonate beneath the surface humor to form a complex vision of humanity.

The play centers on Arthur, a science writer, public television host and popularizer of complex ideas. Like a cross between Carl Sagan and Richard Feynmann, Arthur has just been awarded the Herschel Strange Award for Original Thinking. In particular he is fascinated with the prospect of applying quantum physics to perceptions of reality, exploring the idea that alternate versions of the truth can exist simultaneously in parallel planes, and that certain crucial transitional events can send us into different possible outcomes.

The plot of the Garden family’s life hinges on two significant events: The winter Arthur was ten and his parents were working a resort hotel in the mountains, Sid took him and his brother Max out on the lake to go fishing, while Stella, who was pregnant at the time, stayed indoors. The rowboat capsized.

Decades later, television actress Claire Shayne arranges a double date involving her cousin David, and her best friend Liz, so that she can pursue the attractive young physicist, Arthur.

Using the device of a family party to celebrate Arthur’s award, playwright Meara presents alternative scenarios: Suppose young Arthur rescued his older brother and saved his life: Max grows up to be a fantastically successful writer and producer of soap operas. Claire marries him, instead of Arthur, their baby sister Sharon grows up to be a world class neurotic, and Arthur marries Liz, while carrying on an affair with Claire.

The tensions that rend the family center on Max’s various resentments, for having to feel indebted to Arthur, for choosing a career that is less worthy than his brother’s, and for the frustration of having a severely handicapped child.

But what if Arthur had been unable to save Max? What if the sight of her older son lying lifeless on the dock had caused Stella to miscarry? What if Arthur had fallen for Claire’s cousin David? What if Max had survived, but with serious brain damage?

Each of the alternative scenarios which follow the presentation of the award deals with the various emotional ramifications that follow from the boating accident, but they are tied together by the thread of family dynamics and unresolved conflicts. Stella is angry at her husband, but it is for more than just his rash decision to take the boys out on the icy water. Arthur is searching for his father’s love and respect, but this will require him to break through Sid’s comedic armor, for Sid, who turns everything into a comic routine, is too defensive to permit emotional honesty.

The program notes explain that Down the Garden Path was inspired by a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In addition, reference is made to the physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who brought quantum mechanics to bear on classical physics, in considering the question of whether it is possible to know if a cat, sealed in a box, is alive or dead or, since we can’t see that’s in the box, is it more accurate to say that there are actually two competing realities, one in which the cat is alive…

This erudition can be taken with a grain of salt. I think it is merely a riff, or a shtick, a comic pretense of higher learning which serves as background for Arthur’s character, to give us a sense of who and what he is.

The real seriousness of purpose is to be found in the acting. Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson portray Garden and Dempsey; their daughter Roberta plays Claire; Anne Meara’s daughter Amy Stiller has taken on a double role, as both Arthur’s sister and his daughter; Michael Countryman is Max; and John Proccacino is the multi-talented Arthur. All of these were superb.

And then there is Meara’s gift for dialogue and dramatic confrontation. These were real, and highly enjoyable.