All About Jewish Theatre - A Brooklyn boy, once removed

Eric Weiss is a middle-aged Jewish writer from a blue-collar Brooklyn family whose novel "Brooklyn Boy" just hit the bestseller list. Donald Margulies is a middle-aged Jewish writer from a working-class Brooklyn family whose play "Brooklyn Boy" is running on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre.

Eric is the central character in Margulies' play. The two, character and creator, also share views on a number of things, including life after acclaim. But for all their similarities, Eric is not Donald.

Just ask Margulies - which a lot of people have, something he insists mystifies him. He feigns a yawn to demonstrate how he's come to regard the question. It's also one that Eric (played by Adam Arkin) gets asked frequently in the play. (For the record, Kenny Fleischman is Eric's perceived alter ego in his bestselling novel.)

Of life and art

Art imitating life has been a recurring theme in Margulies work, and these days one doesn't have to look far to see the comparisons: "Dinner With Friends," which won a 2000 Pulitzer, had a long run Off-Broadway, is frequently produced by community theaters and was made into an 2001 HBO movie.

The revival (and Broadway debut) of his early-'90s "Sight Unseen," in which the protagonist, a Brooklyn native, is a successful artist, played through the summer at the Biltmore. The producing Manhattan Theatre Club is quite proud of "following a Donald Margulies revival with a brand new Donald Margulies," says Michael Bush, the organization's director of artistic production.

In an article for the Los Angeles Times in the fall, Margulies wrote, "If 'Sight Unseen' was a play about leaving Brooklyn, then 'Brooklyn Boy' would be one about looking back."

But not literally looking back, says Margulies, dressed all in black and sipping a latte recently in an office not far from the theater. "At the risk of sounding disingenuous, this really isn't my story. It's a story I relate to profoundly, but the incidents dramatized are not from my life but obviously informed by my experience. It's a jumping-off point."

So there were no memory-lane field trips back to the Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island neighborhoods of his - and Eric's - youth. "Whatever needed to be rekindled was already in my head," he says. Margulies' parents are dead, his brother lives in Los Angeles and for years he's lived and worked in New Haven, Conn., where he teaches an undergraduate course in playwriting at Yale University and his wife, Lynn Street, is a practicing physician.

Playwright as collagist

Having started his professional life as a graphics artist, Margulies says something remains of that training: "I'm a collagist - and playwriting is very much like that. I take stuff around me and reinvent it.

"This play is a meditation, not a re-creation," he insists. "It's not a nostalgia piece. In fact, it's sort of anti-nostalgia: taking memory and making it into art - and into commerce."

Eric's previous novels on esoteric subjects far from Brooklyn and on his own life bombed. This time, when, as Bush points out, "he is writing about what he knows," Eric's novel is optioned by Hollywood, and he goes west to meet the blond star who has designs on playing him in the film version.

"I really enjoyed playing with all these doppelgangers - the author of an autobiographical book meeting the actor who wishes to play the film version of that alter ego," says Margulies, whose idea it was to cast Arkin as Eric. (Eric is asked if it's necessary that his main character be Jewish in the film. Margulies says when "Sight Unseen" was optioned, he got the same question.)

Dedicated to Herb Gardner

"Brooklyn Boy" is dedicated to the late Herb Gardner, a fellow Brooklynite whose play "A Thousand Clowns" was the first Margulies remembers seeing on Broadway, at age 9. "It made a tremendous impression on me," he says, "but it didn't inspire me as much as our friendship." That began after Margulies became a playwright himself.

He recalls a telephone conversation with Gardner in the heady period after Margulies won the Pulitzer. "I was lamenting that I wasn't sure what I was going to write next, and Herb said, 'I love your early plays about the borough. Why don't you go back to Brooklyn?'

"When I said, 'Since it's taken my entire life to get out of Brooklyn why would I go back?' he said, 'You've never looked at it from this point in your life.' So that's where the impulse began." Margulies' favorite writers include William Faulkner and Philip Roth, and he's well aware "these are people who continually explored the same terrain but always found new stories to tell."

Director Daniel Sullivan, for whom "Brooklyn Boy" marks his third Margulies play, says, "Donald's work is full of subtext," and the credibility of his characters is one of the things that attracts Sullivan to Margulies' work.

The characters in "Brooklyn Boy," Bush says, "are very familiar to a New York audience. Yet in Costa Mesa, [California, where the play had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory], the audience also saw themselves." The play is running in Paris as well, in a theater where Margulies' work is often produced. "There's a universality to Donald's work," Bush adds.

In all of his plays, Margulies says he begins "with something that's troubling me." In "Dinner With Friends," for example, it was the marital breakups of several couples who were friends of his and his wife's. "Collected Stories," about a mentor-protege relationship, was inspired by a professor he had at SUNY Purchase.

Where things veer off course, Margulies says, is in the back story: The angst-ridden Eric, for example, sees his marriage crumbling in part because his wife (played by Polly Draper) isn't able to conceive; Margulies has been married more than a quarter century and has a 12-year-old son.

"I'm a pretty well put-together person," Margulies says, making a self-assessment. "I live a fairly placid, functional life. If I wrote an autobiography, it would be boring."

WHEN&WHERE ?

Donald Margulies' "Brooklyn Boy" opens Thursday at Manhattan Theatre Club's Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47th St.. For information, call 212-239-6200 or go to www.manhattantheatreclub.com.