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Kvetch by Steven Berkoff
review by Michael Scott Moore

SF Weekly (May 6, 1998)
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Oy

Starring Robert Mackey, Lol Levy, Priscilla Alden, Eloise B. Chitmon, and David
Acevedo.

The beautiful subtitle scene in Annie Hall, where Annie and Alvy lacquer their mutual anxieties with insipid comments about photography, could have inspired Kvetch. The subtitles in Annie Hall tell you what the characters are feeling; in Kvetch, the dull social protocol freezes to let the characters holler their anxieties at the audience. It’s unnerving. (I suppose both are homages as well to O’Neill’s rather more serious use of the device in Strange Interlude.) Kvetch ran for several years at the Odyssey Theater in L.A., where I first saw it, and I think the show succeeded mainly because the yelling is so outrageous. It’s not because of the story: A Jewish salesman with a nagging mother-in-law invites a lonely business acquaintance over for dinner, and nobody knows how to act.
The wife is afraid her meal is no good; the guest isn’t even thinking about the food; the mother-in-law keeps farting. Afterward, the husband and wife have sex. Their anxieties are typical household kvetches you read about in magazines, the kind of worries middle-class (especially Jewish) people are supposed to have, and the kind of nonsense most people eventually get over.

The play is appealingly tasteless. During sex, Frank and Donna both talk to the audience; when Donna straddles Frank she says, “I wanna be raped,” and details her fantasies about the garbage men who come noisily by in the morning. Her orgasm, which we get to watch, has less to do with Frank than with these phantom garbage men. Then it’s Frank’s turn. The dinner guest, Hal, makes an uninvited appearance in his fantasy, and Frank’s orgasm also has very little to do with his wife. These scenes are shocking and funny; but where they lead is finally disappointing. Donna leaves Frank for another man and tells him she’s learned not to worry. “You quit kvetching?” says Frank. “How?” Donna: “By doing what I want and letting the guilt go fuck itself.” Not exactly A Doll’s House.

Teatro Shalom revived this play; they’re a “multi-cultural company” interested in shows producible “without regard to the ethnicity of the actors.” Here they also cast Eloise Chitmon across gender lines, though she wasn’t entirely convincing as a man. And it has to be said that Robert Mackey sometimes looked more like a square-jawed goy trying to be Jewish rather than a truly panicked schlemiel. Lines like “Suppose the bitch hasn’t enough food” can’t be delivered matter-of-factly or they risk just sounding offensive.

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