The American Jewish Theater goes out on a limb with its one-act double bill, Brian Goluboff’s Big Al and Charlie Schulman’s Angel of Death.
Actually, the only reason Big Al makes for unusual Jewish theater is that there’s nothing Jewish about it except (forgive the assumption) the author. Which isn’t to say this creepy, funny play, about a guy so obsessed with writing a screenplay for his idol, Al Pacino, that he sheds his own blood and terrifies his best friend, isn’t worth a look.
Evan Handler, so bland when dodging Nicol Williamson’s errant rapier in I Hate Hamlet, will not be ignored this time. As the unbalanced fan, Handler capably apes Pacino’s movie mannerisms: “You were my brother, Fredo,” “They p-u-l-l-l-l me back in . . .” Gus Rogerson does equally well in the straight-man role, and the piece is energetically directed by Peter Maloney. The play’s raucous and unsettling moments hold us, although I’m not sure what author Goluboff is ultimately trying to say about the movie business or the people who consume it.
Ambiguous motivation is the last charge anyone could direct at Angel of Death, Charlie Schulman’s sicko satire that aims at more targets than a blunderbuss and hits about as accurately. From a tiny nightclub in Buenos Aires where a tanned and very-much-alive Joseph Mengele impersonates Elvis, sings “My Way,” and makes the kind of anti-Semitic cracks that can really turn the stomach of a subscription audience, we go backstage where two hyper, B-movie studio prexies (overplayed by Keith Reddin and Leslie Lyles as overdirected by Bill Hopkins) convince Mengele to make a “fictomentary”--a true story disguised as fabrication. In other words, Mengele is to play a Nazi doctor who escapes the Allied invasion and starts a singing career in Argentina, but, of course, audiences won’t know Mengele is playing himself.
Schulman’s black humor shows in the sequence where the producers, trying to beef up the bio’s box-office potential, make a few changes. Their idea: after Mengele apologizes for killing a mother’s twins and before he blows her brains out, there’s certainly room for a big, romantic kiss.
Whereas Schulman’s other digs at Hollywood are pretty standard (although Anna Thomson has three funny minutes as a bubble-headed Oscar presenter trying to read her cue cards), and his faux racism (via Mengele’s act) sometimes lurches into unredeemed offensiveness, here the ugliness jolts. By comparison, Mengele’s rising political clout is fuzzily detailed, and the play’s conclusion, with fiction crowding out reality, is not as meaningful as it might be.
Though iffy on his German accent, Daniel von Bargen pulls off the nightclub act with icy aplomb. Steven Goldstein, so hilarious in the Atlantic Theater Company’s recent Five Very Live, disappoints here; his poor accent keeps pushing him a beat behind the action.
As if sensing audience resistance to the fare, artistic director Stanley Brechner added an insert to the program in which he explained that both plays are “about the myth of heroes we create in the movies and elsewhere,” and questioned whether an Oscar-clutching Mengele is so far away from a presidential Duke, Buchanan, or Waldheim. For better or worse, Yiddish theater never touched this stuff.
