The Goodman’s been doing a great job of putting diverse ethnic voices onstage. Last season ended with Boleros for the Disenchanted, José Rivera’s sweet, sad look at the consequences of leaving Puerto Rico for the American mainland. Just before that came Ghostwritten, Naomi Iizuka’s fairy-tale treatment of the tangled human—and culinary—relations between the United States and Vietnam. And last November there was Ruined, a devastating piece of work by African-American writer Lynn Nottage about walking casualties of the permanent war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Commissioned by the Goodman, Ruined went on to win the 2009 Pulitzer for best drama.) Even Irish Catholics got significant play at the theater, what with the international Eugene O’Neill fest.
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The new season’s opener was Animal Crackers, which conjured the antic spirits of the Marx Brothers by way of a 1928 musical comedy written by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby—Jews all—that features a song rhyming “explorer” with “shnorer.” The production was a marvel, though it would’ve worked better as a gesture of inclusion if the Goodman hadn’t chosen to set its premiere in the middle of Yom Kippur.
If you’ve been around Chicago theater long enough, you may remember Gross from when he was going to be David Mamet, only funnier. His comedy Lunching was a big hit in 1977. He’s written some other plays, but High Holidays is his first in a long time, a fictionalized memoir of growing up in Skokie—here, for some reason, called Iroquois—during the Kennedy era.
Nate and Essie’s verbal brutality is so pervasive that it’s easy to fixate on it as the source of what’s wrong with High Holidays. But it isn’t. Or more accurately, it is only to the extent that Gross has an ambivalent relationship to it. Early on, Billy’s so cowed by his mother’s tirades that he stutters when he talks to her; before long, though, that’s somehow forgotten and he’s as eloquently snotty as any adolescent.
