Conversations With My Father: A Play - Softcover

Gardner is best known for such plays as A Thousand Clowns and I'm Not Rappaport . In Conversations with My Father , he enters the big leagues of American drama with an ambitious memory play in the tradition of the failed patriarch--a territory owned by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Henry Miller, and others. What is special about this version of the story is its attempt to portray the New York Jewish experience from immigration to a form of assimilation. Covering 40 years of a family living in and running a Canal Street bar and grill, the play explores the destructive influence of a loud, frustrated, funny failure of a patriarch. Though Jewish, the story might easily be Irish or Italian. Beneath its ethnicity, its myth is American. Recommended.
- Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gardner's newest play is set in a New York City bar run by Jewish immigrant Eddie Ross (formerly Goldberg) in the 1930s and 1940s. Eddie has two sons, Joey and Charlie (whose names were Americanized from Jussel and Chaim), and an irreligious attitude. But Eddie hedges his bets, and when his son asks why he should go to Hebrew school, Eddie answers, "All God's got to do is come through once to make Him worth your time." The fate of Eddie's sons and, especially, his relationship with Charlie make up the core of this well-spun drama, which, in production, starred Judd Hirsch as Eddie. Another hit from the playwright of I Am Not Rappaport. Denise Perry Donavin