There’s a terrific twist that comes late in The Wanderers, Anna Ziegler’s absorbing new play at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre off-Broadway. Don’t chastise yourself if you don’t see it coming. (Confession: I didn’t.) Ziegler has written a beautifully shaded portrait of two generations of Brooklyn marriages, and truthfully, you should be drawn in.
Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Sophie (Sarah Cooper) are writers—Jewish and half Jewish, respectively, by their own descriptions—who have achieved very different levels of success. Note Abe’s more-condescending-than-casual lob: “…So you’re going to write another book. That’s the plan?” Truthfully, Sophie doesn’t know. And Abe is quick to assure her: “Well, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to.” More condescension. He apparently racked up a Pulitzer and two National Book awards before he was 30. Sophie, meanwhile, can still quote Michiko Kakutani’s negative review of her book on 19th-century Russian oligarchs.
The other couple are Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a few decades earlier: the painfully shy Schmuli (Dave Klasko)—“I’m very pleased to be stuck with you,” he declares after the wedding—and the bright, forward-thinking Esther (Lucy Freyer), who fills in the silences between them. These, we eventually learn, are Abe’s parents; from Esther, we hear about Sophie’s mother, Rivka, who married a non-Jewish “African American”—said with emphasis to convey the community’s shock, not Esther’s: “But if Rivka and Harold don’t have the most beautiful children in the world. And if Rivka is not one of the happiest women I know. I mean, if she’s crazy, then sign me up for the asylum.”
There’s both an artistic and emotional gulf between Abe and Sophie; it’s immediately visible. (Thomas and Cooper play well off each other; Cooper, who you likely recognize from her viral Trump lip-sync videos, is very compelling in her professional stage debut.) With that distance in mind, little wonder Abe embarks on a flirtatious, and eventually extremely personal, e-mail and DM correspondence with the movie star Julia Cheever (Katie Holmes, doing a little too much with her hands but otherwise well cast), who attended one of his book readings. She loved his comment “about the never-ending conflict between the head and the heart, between the private and the public self, between what we think we want and what we actually have.” Flattery, my friends, will get you everywhere with a narcissistic 30-something award-winning novelist father of two.
Director Barry Edelstein—artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, where The Wanderers premiered—seamlessly toggles back and forth between Abe and Sophie, Schmuli and Esther, and Abe and Julia, whose exchanges come to dominate the conversation. But he zooms in on a few quiet moments too, such as a truly gorgeous scene (lit by Kenneth Posner) of Schmuli extolling the virtues of fresh-fallen snow.
Ziegler, whose tennis-themed The Last Match played the Laura Pels in 2017—packs a lot into just 105 minutes, and even makes us want to read Sophie’s and Abe’s family-inspired books. Well, definitely Sophie’s.
The Wanderers opened Feb. 16, 2023, at the Laura Pels Theatre and runs through April 2. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
