July 11 - August 3, 2003
2003 Festival
Reviewed July 23—24

The Last Schwartz

Reviewed July 23, 2003
Running time 2 hours 10 minutes

It seems that every year there is one new play that stands out as a delightful discovery. Last year it was Lee Blessing’s Thief River and the year before it was Craig Wright’s The Pavilion. This year it is Deborah Zoe Laufer’s lovely and touching The Last Schwartz.

Storyline: Brothers and a sister gather, along with their more or less significant others, on the first anniversary of the death of the family’s patriarch. They are together in the old family home on the eve of the religious ceremony unveiling his tombstone but there is family business to be conducted. One brother wants to sell the unused house. The sister passionately objects. Another brother couldn’t care less.

Actually, the house is the least of the matters on everyone’s mind. The real problem is the lack of male heirs to carry on the family line. When the girlfriend of the non-committal brother blurts out the fact that she’s scheduled for an abortion, all manner of arguments and machinations break out.

Director Lucie Tiberghien varies the pace of the action so skillfully that a sense of momentum is built up that precisely matches the increasing complexity of the story. The opening scene, which builds from simple chit-chat to energetic farce is followed by a gently quiet introduction of the brother who is loosing his eyesight who simply says of the previous exchange “I wish I was going deaf, not blind”

The cast includes a standout pair of Lee Sellars and Jennifer Mudge, about whom more below, and a delightfully comic turn by Broadway veteran Coleen Sexton. Her portrayal of the freethinking, free-loving pregnant girlfriend is so innocently clueless but genuinely kind that she makes the dipso someone you really are glad you know.