Abstract
Donald Margulies (b. 1954) declares, I am a playwright who unapologetically writes what he knows. I am a lower-middle-class, urban American Jew who grew up in the double shadow of the Depression and the Holocaust.” Dinner with Friends (1999), which won him the Pulitzer Prize, is about sleek Connecticut suburbanites of no particular ethnicity, but all five of the plays in Sight Unseen and Other Plays, his first trade publication, are in one way or another about middle-class Brooklyn Jews. Two of them, The Loman Family Picnic and Sight Unseen, dramatize different generations of Jewish American unease.
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Notes
a lapsed Jew: Quoted in Celia Wren, “The Timeless Dance of Art and Money Takes Center Stage,” New York Times, “Arts and Leisure,” February 25, 2001.
We all had a sense: Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America(New Brunswick, NJ, and London, UK: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 70.
Herb Gardner, Conversations with My Father, in The Collected Plays (New York: Applause Books, 2000): You’re Jewish you gotta, 317; Charlie Goldberg, 316; a goyish-sounding name, 325; I don’t get it, 331; Brisket Tzimmes, 320; He even tells Joey, 330; Voo iz mine yarmulkeh 325; I knew a man, 322; I got my own deal, 325; It’s a terrible place, 358–60; How come Roosevelt, 352; Show em, kid, 369; You watch me, 377; Yussel Solomon Goldberg, 376; Izzy, tough but warm, 379; stuck in some sacred, 385; the Royal Mounted Rabbis, 330; Charlie crumples, 381; Charlie picks up, 390.
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© 2008 Julius Novick
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Novick, J. (2008). More Fathers and Sons. In: Beyond the Golden Door. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611832_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611832_10
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