Theater

Mason jars: Jackie’s back in “The Ultimate Jew” at New World Stages.

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

Jackie Mason: No More Jews-And-Gentiles Jokes
When Jackie Mason’s “The
World According to Me” opened in New York in December 1986, it marked the most triumphant return for a comedian one could imagine. Ever since the early 1960s, when Mason had been accused of making an obscene gesture on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the comic’s career had been in shambles.
But “World,” which ran for a record-breaking two and a half years on Broadway, catapulted Mason back to stardom, and he went on to land high-profile television roles (including his Emmy Award-winning cameo as Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky on “The Simpsons”), film roles and even the job as host of a nationally syndicated radio program. Now Mason is coming back to New York in his

eighth one-man show, “Jackie Mason — The Ultimate Jew” and the 76-year-old comedian insists that it will be his last.
Mason’s warm, crinkly, heavily Yiddish-accented voice crackles over the phone from his hotel in Miami Beach as he discusses his “religious determination” never to repeat jokes from previous shows, since he knows that “everyone asks the same question at the box office — are all the jokes really new? No one wants to spend 80 cents, much less $80, to hear jokes they already know.”
The show’s humor, he said, will be focused on “whatever people discuss at dinner, are conflicted or excited about,” which leads to his perennial topics of politics (with a lot of jokes about the presidential candidates and the war in Iraq), technology, current events, conspicuous consumption and food.
He does not, however, plan to do a whole segment, as in the past, on the differences between Jews and gentiles. “People have heard the stuff about gentiles to death already,” he explained. Not that a lot of Jewish stereotypes do not still have currency — “You still can’t find a Jew over 50 who can turn on a computer, change a flat tire, fix a toilet or paint a wall,” he claims — but the rise of intermarriage has meant a “softening” of attitudes between Jews and non-Jews.
For example, while some Jewish parents may still look askance at their son’s marrying a non-Jewish woman, he said, before long his mother thinks that “she’s the nicest person who ever lived — she schleps him to my house all the time. Even my daughter calls once a year; she calls every eleven minutes. She has more of a Jewish heart than any Jew.”
He has performed so often and so widely, Mason said, that he can “sense if laughter is about to come — if the situation is pregnant with humor or if somehow it doesn’t really connect.” He said he is very attentive to the body language of the audience. If he thinks that people are reacting to him as they would react to a “yenta who starts talking about her children for three hours,” then he knows to cut a joke short.
But he said that the reason that this show will be last in New York is because the critics are simply too tough. “They’re looking for one mistake somewhere instead of just trying to have a good time. They’re involved with artistic standards that have nothing to do with laughs.”
“Jackie Mason — The Ultimate Jew” kicks off a 10-week run on March 18 at New World Stages/Stage 3, 340 W. 50th St. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m, with Saturday matinees at 2 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. There will also be three Wednesday matinee performances at 2 p.m; they will be on March 26, April 9 and April 23. For tickets, $46-$76, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200.
Ben Katchor:
Workers Unite
Theater, it is often said,
is a union of many different art forms, including literature, music, dance, painting and architecture. Even so, one musical running in New York this season incorporates a more pop culture type of art — the comic strip. For MacArthur Award-winning cartoonist Ben Katchor, whose musical “The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower,” premieres in New York this season, graphic art is a natural springboard for theater. The New York Times has dubbed Katchor “the most poetic, deeply layered artist ever to draw a comic strip.”
During a telephone interview from his Manhattan apartment, Katchor’s voice comes across as warm, soft, reflective. Before the advent of printing, Katchor pointed out, it was on stage that text and image were first combined. He talked about the ancient Asian tradition of the “picture reciter,” in which the performer put up a painted, multi-image banner and sang or recited a story.
To Katchor, 56, drawings by audience members of key scenes in Elizabethan dramas can be considered “proto-comics.” And in Victorian England, the illustrations by George Cruikshank in Charles Dickens’ novels were so beloved in their own right that when the novels were turned into plays, those illustrations needed to be dramatized as well. “Comics are print theater,” Katchor concluded, “even though they exist in diagrammatic time rather than real time.”
Five years ago, the director of a music festival in Turin, Italy, commissioned Katchor, along with musician Mark Mulcahy, to create an opera. Katchor took a one-page strip that had run in Metropolis Magazine, and expanded it into a full-length opera, “Carbon Copy Building.” He collaborated again with Mulcahy on both “The Rosenbach Company,” about rare book collector Abraham Rosenbach, and “Slug Bearers,” which is about a philanthropist who tries to help exploited workers on a faraway, environmentally degraded island. The “slugs” are the little weights that provide heft to most modern appliances.
Katchor’s cartoons surround the actors; they are projected on the backdrop and also displayed on downstage folding scrims. The musical expresses Katchor’s concern that the world is becoming, in his words, “digitized and dematerialized,” that it is, in a sense, losing its three-dimensionality.
While Katchor’s comic strips, including “The Jew of New York,” tend to focus on Jewish issues (he is also writing a book on the dairy restaurant for the Nextbook series), he says that “Slug Bearers” has no explicit Jewish content. But he says that it does speak to the “Jewish preoccupation with helping people in an organized way.” And he says that the “Jewish angle is that I wrote it — it’s as Jewish as I am.”
“The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island” runs through March 2 at the Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St. Performances are Tuesday evenings at 7 p.m, and Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m. Matinees are on Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. For tickets, $60 ($20 for students), call the box office at (212) 353-0303.

Itamar Moses:
The Secret Of Success
Does an obsession with success
make it harder to attain? For the characters in Itamar Moses’ new two-person play, “The Four of Us,” which has its New York premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club this season, success comes only when it is unbidden. The play focuses on a friendship between two writers, novelist Benjamin (Gideon Banner) and playwright David (Michael Esper), whose friendship is threatened when Benjamin’s first novel is a surprise best seller, but David is still toiling in the literary trenches.
Directed by Pam McKinnon, who helmed last season’s acclaimed production of Edward Albee’s “Peter and Jerry” at Second Stage, the comedy was first staged in San Diego, where it won the San Diego Critics Circle Award for Best New Play. Variety calls Moses, 30, the “most self-consciously clever among the current crop of young playwrights.”
Moses is the son of Israeli immigrants who came to the Bay Area just before the 1967 war. When he was in high school, he caught a production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” at the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco, and he started thinking about writing a play. After graduating from Yale, Moses went on to graduate work at NYU, and then to a career as a professional playwright. Among his other plays are “Bach at Leipzig,” “Outrage,” and “Celebrity Row.”
A chance meeting with Tom Stoppard, who took an interest in his work, has led many to see Moses’ work as paying homage to the great British playwright. But Moses begs to differ. “It would be hilarious if it weren’t so damaging,” he says. “My work gets pigeonholed as a result.”
“The Four of Us,” Moses says, is “really a play about growing up as a writer, creating a public self that isn’t really you, but also preserving that childlike sense of wonder that made you want to be a writer in the first place.” While the title has multiple meanings, Moses says that it’s ultimately about the duality of our public and private selves.
He said that David’s dilemma is one that springs from his own experience, in which he has felt intensely jealous of friends who are also writers. “You root for them and you want them to do something interesting and expand the sense of the possible for your own writing, but you’re also uncomfortable when they’re being rewarded more than you are.”
The key to success, Moses said, is not to be too hung up on it. Just as in personal relationships, he concluded, you “get things you want if you let go of the wanting.”
“The Four of Us” starts previews on March 6 and opens March 25 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th St. Performances are Tuesday through Sunday evenings at 7:30 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. For tickets, $50, call the box office at (212) 581-1212.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization