Off- and Off-Off-

New York is the hub of America's theatrical creativity, the preeminent place for new playwrights giving us new shows. But the innovation does not primarily come from Broadway. As I pointed out last time, Broadway is seldom in the originality business. Almost everything found on the Great White Way is recycled somehow from works of art that have gone before. Completely original projects abound in New York, but not in the forty houses that give us the really big shows. Instead the thrill of the truly new must be pursued in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway houses.

The label of Off-Broadway is technically restricted to New York houses from 100 to 499 seats that honor certain Actors' Equity rules. Many are found in the Theater District, so Off-Broadway does not necessarily mean literally off Broadway. Off-Off-Broadway denotes houses that are smaller than that and (though here the nomenclature gets tricky and inconsistent) follow so-called Showcase rules when employing Equity personnel. Some use the label Independent for small houses that don't follow the rules, though I cannot see why a larger house that failed to do so would not also qualify as Independent. As I'm here neither as lawyer, lexicographer, nor land surveyor, I shall leave the exact boundaries to those who care.

My point, instead, is simply that the truly new is almost always found in the truly small.

On a recent November weekend devoted to these smaller venues I was able to supply experimental validation of this thesis. The new works were here, and they were excellent. I was not looking for a particular theme, but of course one emerged. Each play waded into some big issues, in the popular modern mode of mixing a lot of humor in with the seriousness.

I'll acknowledge that not everyone would agree that the issues in The Atmosphere of Memory, by David Bar Katz, which played at the Bank Street Theater for a "showcase" limited run, are big ones. Bar Katz's play examines the role of the artist mining family memories. Jon, the protagonist, a playwright, has crafted a "memory play" a la Tennessee Williams (except that the characters frequently speak like refugees from Woody Allen). The play-within-the-play is in rehearsal as the play-without-the-play begins. Jon has arranged to cast his real mother (Ellen Burstyn) as the character based on his mother, his girlfriend in the role based on his sister, and ringers for himself and his father for the roles based on himself and his father. This highly inopportune mingling of real and fictional worlds goes off the hook completely when Murray, his estranged father (the uproarious John Glover), crashes the rehearsals and then the family circle. Murray holds to the thesis that Jon has got the critical facts wrong, and that Jon's dramatized whining about his childhood is completely off-base. A pile of notebooks and tapes then emerge to referee the clash of Jon's memories and Murray's debunking.

This setup gives us a jumping-off point for explorations of the unreliability of memory, as well as the moral responsibility (if any) of the memoirist or the fictionalizer of memoirs to the real people depicted in his/her writing. Despite a somewhat comic treatment, Bar Katz is trying to make a serious point.

Jon is convinced that his mom loved him and his dad rejected him, and that there was some hideous dark secret in his family which led him to cut the somewhat nebbishy figure he does. Eventually we get to the bottom of it, which is essentially that there's no bottom there. We find out, in fact, that his family suffered from no more than the ordinary amount of disharmony, and it was his mom who didn't love him all that much, not his dad. But even his mom made a reasonable effort to get on with the business of parenting. Jon's angst, it is suggested, is a predictable outcome of his need as an artist to have some raw material, little more...