The hero of Timothy McNeil's The Twilight of Schlomois a stand-up comic who blew his chance at the bigtime because he dropped acid in the green room of “The Johnny Carson Show.” Drug abuse later costs him his job as a wine salesman. Welcome to the world of Richard Berger -- birth name, Schlomo. Now living in a squalid apartment in East Hollywood, Richard tries to hide his anger and pain behind a veneer of wisecracks. He also gets involved in a coke deal with his thug-like neighbor, Jackson (Danny Parker). And he insults his ex-stripper girlfriend Galina (Kelly Hill, alternating with Vera Cherny) just about every chance he gets.
Richard is a piece of work, and if it weren't for Jonathan Goldstein's brave-hearted performance, it would be hard to sit through the entirety of Twilight. Not only is he a victim, he's slobby, boorish and foulmouthed. And a bit of a pedophile, a fact that comes out when he makes a drunken pass at his stepdaughter RFK (Lila Bowden).
Richard's idol is Richard Pryor, the Black comedian who killed himself on crack. "Why do you admire him?" asks RFK. "Because he was brave and funny," comes the reply. Richard follows Pryor down the same self-destructive path but is saved late in the second-act by the intervention of two women. One is RFK, who helps him rediscover his long-suppressed Jewishness (his parents were Holocaust survivors); the other is Lydia (Nikki McCauley), a naive but big-hearted Texas gal who is married to the loutish Jackson. It's Lydia who tries to comfort Richard when he learns that his ex-wife (another stripper; shades of Lenny Bruce!), has been beaten to death by two drug dealers. Lydia's compassion for Richard motivates him to come to her aid when Jackson starts beating up on her. It's Richard's first act of selflessness in a long time, and it points the way to the possibility of his redemption.
The above events are saturated with darkness and desperation, but thanks to Goldstein's valiant work -- and to the playwright's way with gallows humor -- The Twilight of Schlomo shows glimmers of light and hope.
