Calling his comedy Two Jews, Talking, Ed Weinberger—whose television sitcom credits are something to conjure with (Taxi, for instance)—isn’t leading anyone astray. He’s laying it right on the line.
Two Jews talk, all right. If playwright Weinberger were including Yiddish expressions, which he isn’t—except for one exception—he might have dubbed this mild work “Two Jews, Kvetching”: “kvetching” loosely translated as complaining, which Jews are (stereotypically?) assumed to indulge in with some regularity.
Anyway, talking is exactly what these two Jews do for only about 60 minutes or so. To be more exact, that’s really what four Jews do. The first pair of Bud (Bernie Kopell, tv’s Love Boat-plus fame) and Lou (Hal Linden, Barney Miller, The Rothschilds) exercise their jawing on the desert in the year 1505 BCE. The second pair of Marty (Linden) and Phil (Kopell) gab away just last week in a cemetery where Marty’s wife and Phil’s son are buried.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
In the desert, Lou and Bud complain about being hopelessly lost. Moses has led them out of Egypt some forty years or thereabouts earlier but has not yet delivered them to the land they’ve been promised. Lou does the most grumbling, while Bud is more accepting of the hot and sandy conditions. Through their 20-minute exchange, they crack a few jokes but nothing of much import. (Why they’re Bud and Lou, immediately reminiscent of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, is never explained. They never rise to a “Who’s-on-first?” level.)
Marty and Phil, meeting as strangers on a cemetery bench, discuss subjects that men of many religious branches would: how often they get up at night to urinate, their aging health, their aging marriages. Marty tells a few jokes he hopes Phil hasn’t heard before, which becomes a running gag with some eventual pay-off. The jokes are funny enough, if not side-splitting.
One truly amusing series of gags occurs when the men look around at various tombstones, read the name on it and provide an epitaph, e.g., “Sheldon Katz…never picked up a check,” “Lillian Bender…faked every orgasm.”
That follows a sequence that some might judge less appealing. In it Marty explains to Phil which everyday items are gentile and which are Jewish, as in: “A pheasant is gentile. A chicken is Jewish.” That goes on for about a minute. Some patrons will likely appreciate the insight into the stereotypical Jewish mind. Others may simply take offense.
Towards the end, Weinberger decides to have Marty and Phil introduce some gravity into the proceedings. Phil confides the death of his gay son. Somehow, the change of tone isn’t sufficient to lift the comedy’s dramatic level. For some the ploy may even have the opposite effect.
Incidentally, for the second half, designer Harry Fiener indicates Marty and Phil are in what looks like a park. The audience is only made aware of the actual site when Phil suggests that Marty’s eating lunch in the setting could be considered objectionable. It’s a mite jarring.
Fiener’s rearranged first- and second-part sets also raise an intriguing question. As Two Jews, Talking begins, Lou is sitting on what resembles a stone. He talks about his “fakakta feet.” (In Yiddish fakakta means screwed up and is the only Yiddish word Weinberger includes.) Lou is also angry at the boots he can’t get on. The only other piece in front of Weinberger’s endless-desert projection is a scrawny tree with no leaves. For the Phil and Marty sequence, the stones are gone in favor of a park bench. What does remain is a short tree now in full bloom.
Hmm. At the start of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Estragon is sitting on a stone wrangling with a boot. The only growth on the barren landscape is a scrawny tree with no leaves. When Beckett’s second half begins, the tree is still scrawny but has sprouted a few sad leaves.
The inference irrefutably to be drawn is that playwright Weinberger is broadly alluding to Waiting for Godot. But to what purpose? Maybe he’s just having a giggle for Beckett fans. He’s surely not equating Two Jews, Talking with Waiting for Godot or Bud, Lou, Phil and Marty with Vladimir and Estragon.
So, let’s allow him his scholarly allusion—as well, perhaps, as a nod to the Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner “2000-Year-Old-Man.” Otherwise let’s just leave things about Two Jews, Talking, with its pleasant performing by two welcome veterans and direction by the admirable Dan Wackerman, at a mild, “Vey iz mir.” Loose English translation: Woe is me.
Two Jews, Talking opened August 29, 2022, at the Theatre at St. Clements and runs through October 23. Tickets and information: twojewstalking.com
