Theater Reviews—

Retirement Isn’t As Easy As Moving South: ‘The Model Apartment’

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — In 1983 a New Yorker writer named Susan Sheehan published a book called Is There No Place On Earth For Me? in which she chronicled the daily life of Sylvia Frumkin, an appallingly loud, difficult, obnoxious,  tormented young woman who happened to be schizophrenic. The book, which became a classic of reportorial journalism, captured the dilemma of a profoundly disturbed patient who did not want to be confined in a mental institution, but was too much for her aging parents to handle, and incapable of functioning on her own for any length of time.

Watching Donald Margulies’ The Model Apartment at Long Wharf recently, I kept thinking of Sylvia Frumkin. That statement is both a tribute to the playwright’s accuracy in portraying a person with this illness, but also a distraction from the play’s point that Debby’s dysfunction was the product of her parents’ burden of memory.

The play, a series of brief episodic scenes with no intermission, is set in a Florida condominium. Max and Lola, a newly retired couple from Brooklyn, arrive in Florida to discover that the new one bedroom unit they signed up for is not ready yet; it still needs paint and carpeting. Until this can be finished, the manager arranges for them to stay in the development’s “model apartment,” a furnished studio.

They soon discover the model apartment is a glitzy sham, designed to lure elderly hopefuls from the north: the television and the refrigerator are fake; they will have to sleep on a convertible couch, and all the knickknacks are glued to the surfaces they decorate. Max and Lola are in good spirits, though. They break out a bottle of wine and celebrate the fact that they have finally gotten away from “her.”

However, no sooner have the lights darkened and they have slipped under the sheets of the Castro, the door bangs open and in walks a grossly overweight, inappropriately dressed and extremely loud figure — their daughter. Debby, who has clearly not been taking her meds, found out from their neighbor that they retired to Florida (decamping in the middle of the night, no less), so she got in a car and drove down to find them, her speech a garbled ramble of show tunes, Nazi persecution fantasies, and recitations of what she has eaten.

If Max and Lola thought it couldn’t get any worse, they were not prepared for the midnight arrival of Debby’s boyfriend, Neil, a mildly retarded young homeless black man.

How the parents deal with this situation is the substance of the plot. The reason for all this, according to the playwright, lies in their history and its impact. Max and Lola are Holocaust survivors. She was a teenage inmate of Bergen Belsen. He got through the war by hiding in the woods, while his wife and baby were killed by the Nazis. They met when the war was over, and came to America to make a new life together.

But it is not so easy to escape the past. However much they tried to concentrate on their new life, both were consumed by the memories of what had happened to them. Lola dealt with it by ritualistically repeating tales of life in the camp, focusing on a supposed friendship with the young Anne Frank, who had been a fellow inmate of the women’s camp at Belsen (rather than talk about the way she did not look back, when her mother was led away to her death)

Max, meanwhile, made a point of refusing to discuss anything that happened. He named their daughter Debby, after his lost daughter Deborah, and when he dreams at night, it is not, as Lola imagines, dreams of “a young chippy who makes you feel strong,” but rather imagined visions of what Deborah would be like now.

It is the burden of these stories, and these responsibilities that she feels her parents have placed on her shoulders, that has driven Debby mad, she tells her parents in an anguished confrontation. She hears the screams of the dying and fears persecution by Nazi murderers, she eats to assuage the hunger of starving millions, and she has never been allowed to be herself because she has to carry on the image of the lost Deborah.

As an idea this is intriguing. It is certainly well documented that the children of Holocaust survivors have had problems of adjustment, both because of what their parents talked about, and what they did not talk about. You can argue as to which came first: Debby’s insanity or her family’s pathology.

Nontheless, the most riveting performance in the play is given by Roberta Wallach in the twin roles of the appalling Debby and the wraithlike Deborah of her father’s dreams. Corey Parker Robinson is also very effective in the role of the innocently irresponsible Neil.

Next to them, George Coe and Elizabeth Franz are a trifle hackneyed in their portrayal of the survivors, although Franz revealed surprising sweetness in her empathetic response to Neil’s account of how the death of the grandmother who used to care for him left him homeless and alone.

The Model Apartment is worth seeing for the purpose of generating a good discussion, but it is not a play to take children to. Also, if you have issues with mental illness in the family, be careful; it can be troubling indeed.

(A feature on Long Warf’s Stage II, performances of The Model Apartment continue until May 13. Contact the theatre for ticket prices, curtain times and other information, at 203-787-4282.)