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Kvetch by Steven Berkoff
review by Jean Schiffman

citysearch7.com (April 21, 1998)
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British playwright Steven Berkoff is probably best known in the Bay Area for
"East," a comedy about a Jewish London working-class family that received a sterling production here a few years back. "Kvetch's" characters, however, have
a distinctly Los Angeles feel (Berkoff is also an actor who has worked in
Hollywood): Frank, a Jewish fabric salesman and Donna, his whiny, horny wife;
Donna's elderly mother, who's embarrassingly flatulent (always good for cheap
laughs); one of Frank's clients, a dress manufacturer. There's also a dinner
guest, a recently divorced coworker of Frank's.

Berkoff's theatrical gimmick: these discontented folks express their true
thoughts and feelings in asides to the audience, while simultaneously
struggling to maintain equilibrium on the surface. It's not a new gimmick, but it's
one that guarantees at least a few laughs as actors segue from snarls to smiles.
In "Kvetch," the characters rage at one another subtextually and confess their
free-flowing anxiety to us, during which time the action temporarily freezes. As
the plot progresses--from an awkward dinner party with coworker and mom as
guests and Frank and Donna as nervous hosts, to sex scenes in which the
unhappy pair fantasizes wildly about other people, to a sales meeting, to illicit
trysts--Frank and Donna gradually get more in touch with their hidden desires
and, presumably, ultimately break free of the compulsion to kvetch (nag,
complain).

I applaud tiny Teatro Sholom's commitment to nontraditional casting, but in a
play like this, written in a distinctly Jewish idiom, it just doesn't work to cast
actors who have little feeling for that idiom and in fact have trouble
pronouncing the Yiddish expressions, which was the case with at least a few of
the performers here. That said, Priscilla Alden makes a fine Jewish mom
(although her role seems extraneous to the play) and Claudia Rose is
convincing as the sexually frustrated Donna. Likewise, Lol Levy is a suitably
flustered coworker (although his accent wanders).

Miscasting aside, there's a general tendency for the actors to play too big in
this production, as directed by company cofounder David Gassner, and to
express their hidden anxieties with little variation and ingenuity. Also, on
opening night anyway, the timing--which needs to be impeccable for Berkoff's
gimmick to work--was distinctly off. That said, the play itself seems superficial, a
silly conceit that's worth a "Saturday Night Live" sketch but not much more,
although maybe a subtler production would bring out its deeper humor.
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