Sam Weisman: "Don't say that."

Stern and Weisman are artistic partners in bringing out the West Coast premiere of "Table Settings," a comedy by James Lapine that opens at the Matrix Theater on Saturday. Stern is producing. He's sunk $40,000, by his own estimate, into refurbishing the Matrix. It has new seats and carpeting, a thrust stage and a $25,000 lighting system that can be computer-operated ("We could bring a Broadway show in here"). He wants the best at the Equity-waiver level. He even canceled a production of "Modigliani" earlier this year because it wasn't up to snuff.

Weisman, who is a solid part of the Actors for Themselves group now ensconced at the Matrix, is making his West Coast directorial debut with "Table Settings." It was well received at the Playwrights Horizon in New York last season, but less so in Chicago and Montreal, where Lapine was suspected of being clever at his characters' expense.

"What he does is take the Jewish stereotypes for what they are—stereotypes—and then he pushes deeper," said Weisman. "It's an episodic comedy that looks at three generations of a Jewish family, and shows how far apart people are in their needs. It has its own style. It's very offbeat in the way it uses them. I think the closest writer in spirit to Lapine is Jules Feiffer." Weisman reports that "Table Settings" was written in a blaze of creative intensity that lasted two weeks.

THE FAMILY THAT EATS TOGETHER...
BY DAN SULLIVAN

A cynic might describe the family as an institution dedicated to driving its members crazy. Yet it must have something going for it, or why (for instance) would all those Oscar winners have taken up so much time thanking their mothers, fathers and sisters back in Alabama?

It is one of those necessary human arrangements that the race has never made up its mind about. The tendency in the theater has been to take the dark view. Aristotle in "The Poetics" recommends the family matrix as ideal for tragedy-maximum love, maximum rage, maximum opportunity. The playwrights have agreed. Think of "The House of Atreus" or "Hamlet" or "Ghosts" or "Long Day's Journey" or "The Homecoming" or "Buried Child." Family here is inseparable from family curse.

There is a kinder stage tradition, too. It presents home as the great good place, with Mother and Father the source of all virtue and wisdom. Evil is whatever threatens the "family. The American stage is rife with examples, from 19th-century homestead melodrama to "Ah, Wilderness" (the family O'Neill wished he had grown up in) to Thornton Wilder's plays. It's also one of network TV's kinder fictions, as in "The Waltons," "Little House on the Prairie" and "Eight Is Enough."

Los Angeles has just seen two plays that went about as far as you can go, on the one hand, to canonize the family, and, on the otheir to dump-on it. On the positive side, we had "Turn to the Right," in which a stalwart son helps his sainted mother and virtuous sister save the family peach orchard Even for a piece set in 1914, it seemed a bit idealized. On the other side, "Prairie Avenue" showed us an unbalanced son burning the neighborhood down to get back at his pig of a father for slapping his whining Ma around. There was a lot of idealization going on here, too—in reverse.

A play that told the truth about family life would have to be mixed. It would have to deal with its doubleness: how you can feel part of a family yet alone in it. It would have to deal with the usualness of family life, its regular run of mealtimes and bedtimes. It could use an ear for the funny things that family members say to each other, especially when they're being earnest. And it could convey another double truth. This family will die. The family will persist.

James Lapine's "Table Settings" at the Matrix touches on all these matters without getting soggy and universal. Its first interest is getting laughs, and it doesn't mind being a little broad to do so. Call it a Jewish family sitcom, without the plot. It's simply a series of short scenes around the family table, not always in the same apartment, and not always related to eating. We don't miss the story. We can read what's happened to the family since the last meal, by what's said at this one.

For humor, the play owes a lot to Mrs. Portnoy and all. the other Jewish mothers and sons in recent fiction. It also is in debt to 20 years of TV family comedy. There's even the scene where Daddy tells Daughter that over his dead body is she going out that door with her neckline cut down to there. We have seen a lot of this before.

So? Life is imitating TV every day of the week. Lapine figures that if he can draw his characters and situations sharply enough he can get both what's typical and what's unique about them; and generally, he brings it off. He even makes the familiarity of these lives an expressive element. His characters feel like clichés to themselves, and they don't like it. Who wants to be a stereotype?

The mother—grandmother, by now, with her husband dead and her sons grown—has some wonderful chats with us about this. She came from Minsk as a girl, and she still remembers how cold it was there—the cold standing for more than the weather. She has seen a few things in life, more than her sophisticated children have, and it offends her to be written off as a cartoon.

What's so funny about wanting to see your sons eating enough and married to nice Jewish girls? I don't know, but it's impossible not to laugh as Helen Verbit goes through the age-old patterns of worry and joy over her kids and their kids. Take the scene where her granddaughter (Claudia Lonow) announces that she has finally had her first menstrual period, known to all as "it." Verbit celebrates this milestone by briskly slapping the girl in the face in the traditional fashion, and running off in tears to think' that she never had a daughter of her own to welcome thus to womanhood. Is this her s>on s fault? No, but James Sutorius absurdly starts to feel guilty. Families.

Sutorius plays the responsible older married son, killing himself down at his law office all day and drinking too many martinis to unwind before dinner. You can see the heart attack coming, but it is not the sort of play that deals in heart attacks. It's about trying to make the kids quit fighting at the table. Sutorius and his wife Valerie Curtin mostly can't.

Curtin's biggest problem is that she isn't Jewish—not that her mother-in-law throws it up to her, but she feels she doesn't quite belong. In their private moments, though, it's seen that everybody in the family feels miscast and mis-perceived. Nobody understands what I go through day after day. . . .

Everybody has his pet fear. Verbit is afraid they'll ship her off to Miami. Stuart Rogers, as the 13-year-old grandson with the Bar Mitzvah coming up, is afraid he will always be this small. He keeps disappearing into his "cave" under the table, the way his uncle did as a kid— which the uncle, pushing 30, still does. How long does it take for a young man to find himself?

Richard Bey, an amiable druggie, appears to be less worried about his future than everybody else, but we sense the family conscience at work from within. He may be on the verge of getting his act together, especially if the "right girl" should come along. Shelly Batt—a psychiatric social worker with all the words —does not want to get mixed up with this jerk. But she may have been assigned to the role by the life force. Chemistry is destiny.

There's a nice Darwinian ruthlessness to that. "Table Settings" respects its characters, but its basic interest is in the force field set up by the family, whose energy is seen as something more than the sum of its members' input. It is bigger, even, than Mama, and Papa is still involved in it, through the sons. Interesting, to see how it works. And if this family dies, there are a billion others. If a play can be warm and impersonal at once, that's "Table Settings."

I'd been warned off the New York production as being crass and shticky. That doesn't at all apply to Sam Weisman's production at the Matrix. Even when the action gets a bit silly—Sutorius in black sox and bathrobe playing the sex tiger— the actors never drop their concern, and the laughs come against their wishes. Nobody wants to live in a sitcom.

There are a couple of problems. Young Rogers as the Bar Mitvah boy does tend to grab a little, from inexperience. Verbit on opening night had to look for lines that should have come unbidden. Curtin as the shiksa wife confuses us by looking exactly like the smart Jewish girl that Sutorius should have married. Has she been taking ethnic lessons?

Those are details only. "Table Settings" has class, all the way down to Russell Pyle's dining-room set. It could have poked fun at the family. Instead it's severe, suggesting a household with standards, however threatened. Too many plays in Los Angeles are merely presented. This one is produced. Joseph Stern and William Devane, also known as Actors for Themselves, get the credit.

L.A. Weekly, March 27-April 2, 1981 - PICK OF THE WEEK

BY JOIE DAVIDOW