Nicole Hollander’s "Sylvia" comic introduced us to "The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You." That captures Julie Bascov, the hostess at two very different Christmas dinners set 20 years apart in Richard Greenberg’s 2013 drama "The Assembled Parties," now in a local premiere at Raven Theatre.
But unlike Hollander’s smug creation, Julie carries it all off with gracious panache, particularly in Loretta Rezos’ warm performance. Rezos’ Julie is self-aware without being brittle. "I know, I’m a throwback. It’s disgusting," she laughs as she sashays around the kitchen of her 14-room apartment on Central Park West (a place where visitors get lost), attending to the Christmas goose while wearing a vintage frock from her late dress-designer mother.
In food, fashion and film (she had a brief stint on the silver screen as "the Jewish Sandra Dee"), Julie Bascov is a model of good taste and — at least on the surface — good luck. She and her attorney husband, Ben (Joe Mack), even dare to dream in the first act (set in 1980) that their eldest son, Scotty (Niko Kourtis), could be the first Jewish president.
But luck doesn’t hold. Potential has an astonishingly short shelf life. As the saying goes, "If you want to make God laugh, make plans." By the second act, set in 2000, Julie’s dreams have not only been deferred. They’ve been demolished with a vengeance.
In structure, "The Assembled Parties" is similar to Greenberg’s "Three Days of Rain," in which two generations of a family are depicted several years apart. That play used the device of showing first the grown children, and then the same actors playing the parents decades earlier. This play is more straightforward, with only one actor playing two different characters across the linear span of years.
That’s Kourtis, who in the second act is the grown-up (well, sort of) version of Scotty’s young brother, Tim (played as a child in the first act by Leo Sharkey). What happens to Scotty is telegraphed rather obviously early on. The greatest weakness in Greenberg’s script is that it’s difficult to see Scotty as a budding JFK, molded by Ben for great things. He’s a sweet but diffident guy — and his school chum, Jeff (Christopher Peltier), sees him as Scotty’s parents cannot, even as he says to Scotty, "Come to Harvard with me next year and then be president, like a good boy."
Jeff is our real tour guide into the Bascovs’ world — a sort of Nick Carraway to Scotty’s Gatsby. In a phone call to his mother, he describes the Bascov home: "It’s like the sets of those plays you love, with the breezy dialogue."
That of course also serves as a meta-commentary on Greenberg’s own relentlessly epigrammatic characters. Ben’s sister, Faye (JoAnn Montemurro), delivers them with a harder edge, steeped in the old Jewish immigrant neighborhood where she and Ben grew up. Her husband, Mort (Chuck Spencer), is a surly man with an agenda, while their grown daughter, Shelley, is the perpetual odd woman out. (Marika Mashburn nails the persona of a woman who knows she’s mostly tolerated by those around her but can’t quite even work up the energy to resent that state of affairs.)
Greenberg takes some glancing blows at the changing political fortunes of the nation (one wonders what he’d be writing if the play were set today). In the second act, as George W. Bush prepares to take over, Montemurro’s Faye describes his father as "looking like middle management at a Fluffernutter factory." But Rezos’ Julie floats just above the frays, personal and political.
"Prayer is yearning set to music," she says during her ecumenical version of grace before dinner. And indeed, Julie has grace to spare. She needs it by the second act, where Jeff has assumed the role of caregiver as the family circle and fortunes have shrunk.
Director Cody Estle’s staging is mostly sprightly and en pointe, but there are times one wishes for a bit more breathing space between the sculpted quips that barely conceal deeper pain. At times, it feels as if Greenberg is cribbing from himself in this play — we’ve certainly seen variations of these characters ("so witty, so oblique, so overeducated," as Julie puts it) in his world before.
But Rezos’ Julie and Peltier’s Jeff finally do help us see the beauty in maintaining a sense of dignity and even joy in the wake of waning fortune. Slowed by age and illness while preparing the second Christmas dinner, Julie says, "I will get to it when I get to it, and it will all be fine." In Rezos’ delivery, that line contains hints of Beckettian loss, covered up with a defiant insistence on grace. That may be the hardest act of all to pull off. Rezos, like Julie Bascov, makes it look easy — and lets us see how much it really costs.
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
ctc-arts@chicagotribune.com
REVIEW: "The Assembled Parties" (3 stars)
When: Through March 25
Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $43-$46 at 773-338-2177 or raventheatre.com
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