Foreman Goes West With Jewish Comedy

CAST: Harvey Phillips, Judith Claire Stone, Rob LaGamba, Scott Weinger, Stephen Anthony, Rachel Jones, Greg Gerard, Carol Stans.

CREDITS: Director: Ruth Foreman. Playwright: Israel Horowitz. Set designer: Stephen Placido Jr. Costume designer: Jeanne Batridge. Lighting Designer: Barry Tillis.

At the Ruth Foreman Theatre West, Sunrise Musical Theatre, 5555 NW 95th Ave., Sunrise. Shows at 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday; matinees at 2 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday and Saturday-Sunday; through Dec. 6; 940-5902.

Judith Claire Stone and Rob LaGamba play Mom and Dad in Ruth Foreman production.

Producer/director Ruth Foreman clearly had other things on her mind when she mounted Today, I Am a Fountain Pen. The premiere production at her new playhouse inside Sunrise Musical Theatre should have been gangbusters, a spectacle vigorous enough to inspire a groundswell of support from Broward theatergoers. Alas, the only thing breathless about the show were apparently the last-minute efforts of the staff and construction crews to complete the renovations on time for last Friday's opening. The result is an insipid Jewish comedy that looks exhausted. The weariness begins with Stephen Placido Jr., whose set design for the Florida Repertory Theatre's current production of The Price is an inspiration to his profession, but who digresses here to creative infancy.

Instead of exploring the possibilities (albeit limited ones) of the new 500-seat theater, with its thrust stage and seating on three sides, he and Foreman resort to a tired style of proscenium staging often favored in their theater at Florida International University: the creation of a horizontal plane on which everything happens in a straight line.

Besides being depressingly drab and dimensionally flat, this rendering of a drygoods shop, living room and bedroom ignores the opportunity for visual experimentation and restricts actors to moving monotonously side to side. Jeanne Batridge's costumes and especially Barry Tillis' lighting do nothing to relieve the grimness. To make matters worse, Ruth Foreman Theatre West is acoustically flat.

Today, I Am a Fountain Pen by Israel Horovitz is the simplistic tale of a precocious boy's refusal to condone parental hypocrisy. The culprit is bacon, forbidden in the Yanover's kosher home, but consumed by Mom (Judith Claire Stone) and Dad (Rob LaGamba) at the Chinese restaurant in town. When young Irving (Scott Weinger) and the maid, Annie, a delightful natural actress named Rachel Jones, get caught cooking up a batch in the house, there's a lot of squirming around in the grease of false pretenses.

A subplot involving the Ukranian Annie's relationship with an Italian boy (Stephen Anthony in a decent turn) whom her parents (Greg Gerard and Carol Stans) have forbidden her to see on ethnic grounds, reinforces the themes of change and assimilation faced by immigrant families in the 1940s.

The play cries out for speed and abstract staging to accommodate its multiple scene changes and brief vignettes, yet Foreman has chosen to present it realistically. The actors constantly find themselves unable to complete an action because the time frame of the direction doesn't correspond to that of the playwright. Comedic spontaneity is impossible in such a context, and the heavy-handed direction even defeats narrator Harvey Phillips, who tries nobly to animate the proceedings.

Written by VICKI SANDERS
for The Miami Herald, November 18, 1987

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