Tevye With Sour Salt

By Stefan Kanfer

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY FATHER by Herb Gardner

Eddie Ross (Judd Hirsch) is a Manhattan Tevye circa 1936, railing at family, customers and God. The fury is understandable. Both sons are targets of anti- Semitic gangs. Racketeers want a piece of his saloon business. Worse still, Zaretsky (David Margulies), an aging star of the Yiddish theater, keeps informing him of the Holocaust engulfing Europe.

In Herb Gardner's memory play, Conversations with My Father, Eddie takes on the opposition over the course of 40 years. The thugs back off when he threatens them; they sense that this "crazy Hebe" would just as soon die as give them a dime. History is not so easily intimidated. When World War II begins, his adolescent son Joey (Tony Gillan), inflamed by news of the death camps, enlists in the Navy with tragic results. The surviving son, Charlie (Tony Shalhoub), becomes a prosperous novelist but fails at everything else, from marriage to filial affection. Zaretsky's very life is a reproach: the "dying man with a dead language and no place to go" becomes a millionaire and survives to age 93. Eddie, ever the loser, is incapacitated by a stroke.

Through Gardner's witty alter ego, Shalhoub, the playwright evokes a more innocent -- and more malignant -- era, flavoring the immigrant struggle with the sour salt of Jewish proverbs: "Sleep faster, we need the pillow." Eddie sometimes goes on so long the play could be retitled Monologues with My Children. But there is not a weak spot in the large cast, sensitively directed by Daniel Sullivan. Margulies is a geriatric standout, and Hirsch gives the most uncompromising and indelible performance of his career. Producers are always searching for actor-proof roles. Here is something rarer: role-proof actors.