arts & entertainment
Looking For Sunnier Skies
JET's The Model Apartment tells of a retired Jewish couple
who left their difficult life in Brooklyn for a Florida condo.
Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer
M
ichigan has been on the mind of
playwright Donald Margulies.
One of his edgier plays, The
Model Apartment, soon will be staged by
Jewish Ensemble Theatre. His adaptation of
the novel Middlesex, which is set in Detroit,
will be a miniseries on HBO.
The Model Apartment, running May
11 June 5 at the Jewish Community Center
in West Bloomfield, introduces Holocaust
survivors seeking escape from family distur-
bances. Middlesex recounts the experiences
of a hermaphrodite, or person born with
both male and female sexual organs, con-
fronting sexual identity.
"I wrote The Model Apartment when I was
a younger man, and I take a certain pleasure
in revisiting work that I wrote when I was
younger," says Margulies, 56, who teaches
playwriting at Yale University.
"The idea came out of an association with
my closest friend at a time when his parents
were contemplating retiring from their lives
in Brooklyn and transplanting themselves to
Florida.
"They were survivors, and I was struck
by the juxtaposition of where they were 40
years earlier and where they were ending up.
I thought there was something very power-
ful, absurd and poignant in imagining that
juxtaposition, which became the impetus for
the play'
Appearing in the JET production, directed
-
by Lavinia Hart, will be Trudy Mason (Lola),
Tom Mahard (Max), Laurel Hufano (Debby),
Chris Jakob (Neil) and Christina Flynn
(Deborah).
Margulies, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his
play Dinner With _Friends, had a JET reading
of The Model Apartment more than 20 years
ago. JET also has staged his Sight Unseen and
Brooklyn Boy.
"I didn't attend the staged reading so I'm
especially grateful that JET remembered the
play and returned to it with this full produc-
tion," he says. "The reading gave me confi-
dence that the play speaks to people."
Margulies defines almost all of his work
as dealing with the relationship between the
world and domestic life. That particularly
comes across in his latest work for Broadway,
Time Stands Still, which is about war cor-
respondents trying to resettle in their loft
apartment in Brooklyn.
Margulies, raised in a secular Jewish
household in Brooklyn, is a baby boomer
whose sensitivity was shaped by the
Depression and Holocaust.
"I think I bring Judaism into my plays
because it was so much a part of the cultural
fabric of my upbringing:' he says.
Margulies, who began his career as a
visual artist, had no formal theater training.
While studying art at Purchase College in
New York, he started writing plays.
"Theater was something I had always
been exposed to because of my parents'
interest in taking me and my brother to
Broadway shows',' he says. "I was fascinated
by the form of the play and was pretty much
Aha! Moments
Female authors open up about
life-changing statements by men.
Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer
B
onnie Garvin, a graduate of
Southfield High School and Wayne
State University, has built a film
career scripting dramatic true stories for
cable networks.
Black Widower, for instance, reveals the
work of a prosecutor investigating an auto
executive charged with murder. The Killing
Yard spotlights the Attica prison riot and
subsequent court proceedings. When the Vow
Breaks exposes a judge with a double life.
One true story Garvin has not been able
to bring to the screen is explained in a new
anthology, He Said What? Women Write
About Moments When Everything Changed
50
M a 5 2011
(Seal Press; $16.95).
She teams with 24 suc-
cessful female writers
to recall the effects of eye-
opening statements made
by men.
While Garvin is linked
with the group of essayists
who stick to career as sub-
ject, others delve into family
issues, romance, reactions to Bonnie Garvin
illness — the kinds of situa-
tions often remembered as women hold the
center of attention on Mother's Day.
Some essays are humorous; many are not.
There are instances when Jewish upbringing
and family enter into the narrative.
"We can't tell anybody about that" were
self taught."
Although supporting himself for a short
time as a graphic designer and art editor
at Scholastic magazine, Margulies found
his writing momentum working with Jerry
Stiller and Anne Meara on a program for
HBO.
"I say they made a mentsh out of me','
Margulies says.
Margulies, who has had his works pro-
duced since 1982, thinks of The Model
Apartment as having an interesting history
as a dark comedy.
"I wrote it in 1984, and it was optioned by
Joseph Papp for the first couple of years of its
life,' he recalls. "Then, Joe didn't produce it.
"Its world premiere was in Los Angeles
in 1988, but it wasn't produced in New York
until 1995. I won the Obie Award for best
(Off Broadway) play for a play I had written
10 years earlier."
Margulies currently is working on two
commissions — one for the Manhattan
Theatre Club in New York and another for
the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.
"I think The Model Apartment ultimately
is about parents and children',' Margulies
says. "Its about legacy and the hopes, dreams
and expectations parents instill in their chil-
dren no matter what their circumstances.
"In the play, the stakes are very high
because both parents are survivors and their
daughter is mentally ill.
"The play operates almost in a world of
magical realism. Things happen in the play
that don't happen in life. I don't dwell on the
clinical aspect of mental illness because I
the disappointing words — now
essay title — Garvin, now 62,
heard when she pitched a film idea
early in her career. She had wanted
to develop characters contrasting dire
conditions in the garment industry
with the pricey ambience of fashion
houses.
Young and optimistic about oppor-
tunities then, Garvin, who now teaches
screenwriting at USC, had thought
circumstances were on her side. Her
expenses for a trip to Hollywood were
paid to discuss her film proposal. The
television executive she was to see had
been a priest.
"It became the fantasy of what was
in my head against the reality of what
is," Garvin explains of her time before
settling into Cal ifornia."It was emblematic of
what the business is and what was to come."
Garvin appreciated being asked to do
the essay by Victoria Zackheim, another
California writer who also has edited three
earlier anthologies about women. "I thought
Donald Margulies: "I think The Model
Apartment ultimately is about parents and
children."
In The Model Apartment, Trudy Mason (Lola)
and Tom Mahard (Max) play Holocaust
survivors, and Laurel Hufano (Debby)
portrays their mentally ill daughter.
don't wish for the play to be viewed as any
kind of documentary portrayal:' 1
JET presents a production of The
Model Apartment May 11-June 5
at the Jewish Community Center
in West Bloomfield. Performances
are 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 5 and
8:30 p.m. Saturdays and 2 and
6:30 p.m. Sundays as well as 7:30
p.m. Wednesday, May 11, and 2 p.m.
Wednesday, June 1. $32-$41 with stu-
dent and senior discounts. (248) 788-
2900; www.jettheatre.org .
the writers' range of experience was very
interesting, with most writing about their
own evolution',' Garvin says. "I loved that you
could feel the growth of people. There's wis-
dom in all of them.
"There were some very different women
from the ones I knew growing up. When I
was going to Southfield High, I was a late
bloomer. They seemed like early bloomers."
Among those early bloomers were Joyce
Maynard, remembering her rejection at age
19 by author J.D. Salinger after she set aside
her own career dreams to live with him, and
Amy Ferris, explaining her teenage move to
a commune and how bad times led to the
good ones.
"There's a huge cross-section of the kinds
of messages women receive from men over a
lifetime, and that's one of the things I really
love about the book:' says Zackheim, 66.
"I also love the fact that men were not
necessarily put in a bad light. I wanted men
to be seen coming from their own places of
concerns, fears and insecurities. Ultimately, I
think it's a fair look at the male species."