40 | JANUARY 4 • 2024 J
N
I
n the summer of 2018, Farmington
Players was holding auditions for Neil
Simon’s coming-of-age comedy Brighton
Beach Memoirs. Unfortunately, the director
wasn’t finding what she was looking for
from the male group of auditionees until
she heard a spontaneous voice from behind
the casting table.
“Playing a Jew from Brooklyn is more
about attitude than accent,
” exclaimed
Farmington Players Casting Committee
Chair Tony Targan in his best New York
dialect. “You have to question everything
and everyone while still respecting tradi-
tion.
”
The director was so taken with Targan’s
off-the-cuff interpretation of the character
Jack Jerome, the play’s family patriarch, that
she offered him the role even though he
hadn’t planned to audition.
“I really connected with Jack’s sense of
empathy and strength as the moral com-
pass of the family. Jack is the type of father
that I’ve always aspired to be. He relates to
everyone, saying, ‘I know what it’s like,
’ says
Targan, a Bloomfield Hills resident who’s
married with two daughters and two grand-
children.
Six years later, Targan is back with
Brighton Beach Memoirs at St. Dunstan’s
Theatre (St. D’s) but, this time, as the direc-
tor of the production. Bloomfield Township
resident and architect Steve
Sussman takes on the role of
Jack Jerome. Brighton Beach
Memoirs runs weekends Jan.
12-27, 2024.
“It was funny, when I got
cast in this part a friend said,
‘Well, as a Jewish man and
father, I guess you’ve had some
experience in that role,
’” laughs
Sussman who’s making his St.
D’s debut, though he’s very
active at Birmingham Village
Players where he’s been a past
president, actor and playwright.
Brighton Beach Memoirs
is the first of Neil Simon’s
semi-autobiographical trilogy
— preceding Biloxi Blues and
Broadway Bound — as told from the per-
spective of teenager Eugene Jerome, played
by Toby Gittleman of West Bloomfield.
“The play is about the everyday life of
a Jewish family in 1937 at the height of
the Great Depression, with the rumblings
of World War II approaching. The family
struggles with assimilating into American
society while seeking to preserve their own
Jewish traditions,
” says Targan, a retired
attorney who was last onstage at St. D’s
as the Jewish money lender Shylock in
Something Rotten.
When the attacks in Israel occurred one
week before auditions for Brighton Beach
Memoirs, the play took on an even greater
significance for Targan and the other Jewish
members of the cast and crew, including
Targan’s nephew and first-time assistant
director, Mitchell Hart of Birmingham.
“Some of the lines spoken by the char-
acters in 1937 — warning of the growing
dangers in Europe — now have parallels to
the current situation in Israel. It is especially
poignant when Jack Jerome (Sussman) says,
‘Today I read the newspaper. Today I’m
afraid for all of us,
’” Targan says.
“Brighton Beach Memoirs is still highly
relevant today. As Jews, we continue to face
not only the threat of antisemitism and
violence, but we must grapple with how we
respond to those threats. In the play, char-
acters deal not only with outside prejudices,
but also their own. If we see the world as ‘us
versus them,
’ are we consumed by our own
hatred, and how will that outlook affect our
children?”
Targan didn’t have any formal religious
education growing up in a small town in
upstate New York where his family was vir-
tually the only Jewish family.
“While we didn’t face blatant antisemi-
tism, we definitely felt like outsiders. I did
whatever I could to fit in. Like Eugene in
the play, baseball was my ticket to accep-
tance and being ‘one of the guys.
’ I dreamt
of playing in the big leagues, but for the
New York Mets, not the Yankees,
” says
Set in 1937, Brighton Beach Memoirs evokes
the struggles of Jewish life in America.
Still Relevant Today
JULIE SMITH YOLLES CONTRIBUTING WRITER
ARTS&LIFE
THEATER
PHOTOS BY MOLLY DORSET
Steve Sussman and Toby
Gittleman play father and son
in Brighton Beach Memoirs.
Director Tony Targan, right, and Assistant Director Mitchell
Hart discuss characterization with Toby Gittleman who plays
Eugene Jerome in the play.