One day in October 1977, I took a lunch hour stroll up Manhattan's Third Avenue. At the corner of 49th Street, I spotted a new restaurant. A start-up that replaced the venerable Manny Wolf's Steak House. Alongside its name written "Established In 1977".
Wasn't impressed. It was 1977,after all. And Manny Wolf's was on that site for twenty-eight years. Remember thinking could the new owner really feel he could meet or beat that record?
The restaurant that upstart restaurateur, Alan Stillman, randomly named after two guys he pulled from of the Manhattan Telephone Directory, is still going strong. In fact, it's the iconic green and white original site of one of the world's most prominent steakhouse chains, Smith & Wollensky.
With that opening in 1977 in mind, I'm starting this new part of my life with a production smorgasboard. Two theatrical plays. A drama, "Mirror at the Top of the Stairs" and a comedy, "Creating A Kosher Pig". A cable series, "Purgatory". Another comedy series for the web, "Salad Day's". Even a children's book, "Mikey & His Magic Blackboard".
I have a creative side and business side. If the two aren't operating in sync,I lose my emotional equilbrium and walk into walls. Possibly why someday I hope to produce not direct. Maybe even start my own theatre company devoted to providing a platform for new playwrights.
After three months of living on the streets he currently resides at a homeless shelter. Although hungry to rebuild his life, his efforts are mired down in a social services bureaucracy that's understaffed, overworked, and poorly funded to the point where his depression, which is diagnosed "situational" not "chronic", doesn't qualify him for treatment.
Without normal channels available to him, he embarks on a self-styled journey of healing, redemption and renewal.
Help initially comes from Madison Emmett, a shelter volunteer and her "Expressive Writing" class. While her
Stuart Meltzer, Artistic Director Zoetic Stage in Miami, called it "a complex, cathartic tale of letting go of the past and living in the now".
thought-provoking assignments force Sam to explore the mistakes and misconceptions of his life, he finds her biweekly visits aren't enough.
Languishing, he searches for a constant traveling companion to help put his life in perspective.
The search leads him to Bailey, a straight-talking, street-smart Black man who, although new to Sam's life, seems to have been a part of it forever. Every step along their travels, the enigmatic Bailey fills in the blanks and relentlessly challenges everything Sam believes about himself and his world.
The play focuses on what Sam learns from a writing assignment that asked for a "A Happy Childhood Memory". Rather than conjuring up images of family gatherings, father and son bonding, teenage high jinks, Sam comes up with "darkness".
The more he tries to trade the answer for something more conventional, the more "darkness" digs its heels in and refuses to be ignored.
Finally succumbing to it, he finds himself in the middle of the night on the roof top of the tenement house where he grew up. From that vantage point "darkness" provides clarity the daylight never could.
When his journey with Bailey begins, Sam's goal is to find the shortest route back to Caitlin. Somewhere along the way his destination reroutes to finding his way back
to himself. And possibly along that journey his and Caitlin's paths would once again cross.
One of my most memorable critiques came from an Afro-American actor who took part in a reading of "Mirror" who said I was "the only White man he knew who could write Black".
For a detailed critique, check out "Reflections From My Mirror" on the following page written by an actress friend, Monique Bourgery.
"Creating a Kosher Pig" -- My homage to the practice of wrapping medicine in candy. In other words, comedy.
Michelle Caruso and Gertrude Schnur couldn't be more different.
The prior sassy, sleek and fortyish. A worldly, haute-coutured, Ivy League-educated feminist who considers organized religion a pox on Womankind. The concepts "God" and "pischer" interchangable. Geopolitical gains religious conservatives are making dangerous inroads to solidify the second-class status of women.
The latter sixty-plus, plump and pliant. Wardrobe, Russian peasant. Her world, insulated from birth. The center of it God's demand to set her needs aside and focus on marriage, keeping her home kosher and her husband's wants met.
These opposites do share one thing in common -- the love and adoration of a guy named Brody McGovern. This common bond gets the mismatched duo to find the beauty in each other he sees in each of them.
Andrew Leynse, Artistic Director Primary Stages in New York, wrote saying it was "quite funny, the characters well developed and quirky". He "especially enjoyed Brody's conversations with his cat and the developing relationship between Michelle and Mrs. Schnur".
During that search they survive an onslought of clashes and stumbles and come away with an enduring friendship.
They repay Brody with a gift. A shot at immortality. The literary kind.
Oh and there's MacGyver, the cat, with whom Brody lives and has a love-hate relationship. He's never seen but his presence is always felt throughout the action.
After the drama of "Mirror" I deliberately set out to write a comedy to prove the breath of my playwright's voice. Three months later "Kosher Pig" was born. While set in the present, it takes me back to my days growing up on Manhattan's Lower East Side where, for we Shabbos goyim, Yiddish was a second language.
Now that I've experienced Brody's "dialogue" with MacGyver, I plan to move on to my next goal, a one-man play -- with a twist..
Copyright 2012 Mack Edwards. All rights reserved.