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.

