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words got bigger and bigger
Tony Gillan and French and the Spanish
and the characters got small-
before there ever was a
Judd Hirsch in
er," Gardner explains about his
Hitler,"
says Gardner, whose
"Conversations
artistic transition.
wife,
Barbara,
is chairman of
with My Father;"
A Thousand Clowns, which
religious studies at Hunter
the
1991
opened in 1962, was nominat-
College.
Broadway ver-
ed for a Tony Award for Best
"[Anti-Semitism] is always
sion that won a
Play and resulted in his being
breathing
warm air at us
Tony Award for
chosen Outstanding New
from
somewhere,
and
Best Play.
Playwright in the Variety
although things have
Critics Poll that year.
improved in the United
Gardner, recipient of the 2000
States, I think it's always lying there,
Lifetime Achievement Award from the
waiting.
Writers Guild of America, went on to
"Two months ago, someone wrote
Goodbye People (1968), Thieves (1974),
hn Not Rappaport (1985) and
Conversations With My Father (1991),
the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama in 1992.
"All the characters, including the
girls, are some part of me," Gardner
says. "Charlie, the younger boy in
Conversations With My Father, may be
[most] like whatever kind of trouble-
maker I am."
As far as trouble goes, Gardner has
no reservations about stirring it up for
anyone who tries to mask the anti-
Semitism he strives to expose.
When French producers tried to
write out that one character was
Jewish in IM Not Rappaport, he threat-
ened to close the show. His objections
noted, the show stayed open and had
a successful run. Although there have
been many successful incarnations of
Conversations With My Father and
Rappaport in Germany, he did close a
version of the latter in which an actor
refused to speak the lines the French
opposed.
"People tend to think that Hitler
was some mid-20th century aberra-
tion, but [anti-Semitism] was a grand
tradition for the Russians and the
`dirty Jew' all over the French monu-
ment put up in memory of the 20,000
Jewish children that Parisian police
were responsible for sending to the
camps.
"A friend of mine went back every
morning for three weeks, but no one
took it off. I got hold of the French
version of the Anti-Defamation
League. I haven't heard back so [I
think] they cleaned it off or perhaps it
was gone by the time they got there."
Gardner, who was in Detroit years
ago to promote A Thousand Clowns in
its film version, finds lots of sympa-
thetic audiences in Israel, where reper-
tory productions of his plays are pre-
sented in Hebrew and Yiddish.
"I think writing is fun, but it's also
torturous," he says.
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JET's production of Conversations
With My Father runs Oct. 25-
Nov. 26 in the Aaron De Roy
Theatre at the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield. Times
vary by date of performance. $16-
$26. (248) 788-2900.
10/20
2000
89