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.