THEATER REVIEW - “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, and I’m in Therapy!” Produced by: Presley Theatre Group - Playing at: Theatre Three, Port Jefferson, thru May 10th - Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur
Yes, “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, and I’m in Therapy!” is one of the longest-running, one-man, comedy shows in history. And during two hours which seemed like four, that’s exactly the way it felt at Theatre Three on Main Street in Port Jefferson last Saturday: long … very long!.
Even in the hands of the gifted dialectician, Peter J. Fogel, this unrelenting half-Italian, half-Hebrew commentary on New York-style shtick is remarkable only inasmuch as it manages to resurrect jokes we’ve all heard time and again over the past thirty or forty years … and more.
Even a shy Jewish boy’s recollection of stumbling on a mud-caked Woodstock honey named ‘Blossom’ might have seemed an amusing incident to a crude adolescent at one time … but it certainly no longer does. Woodstock is a sad chapter in our culture (if that isn’t too oxymoronic a construction) and history has rightly judged that there was nothing funny about it. Accordingly, the phenomenon has no place in this show.
Okay … that said, its inclusion is relatively harmless. But the play’s script (written by Steve Solomon) takes an altogether misguided tack toward the end of Act I. There, the ethnic harangue departs unwisely from its almost exclusively Jewish and Italian peccadillos (which the monologue’s very title leads us to expect) long enough to get itself into a bit of trouble. This is occasioned by a string of tasteless jabs that stray beyond the Jewish penchant for Chinese food, and take a poke at the Chinese themselves. Totally uncalled for.
It has been widely reported that writer Steve Solomon gave up teaching school in New York in order to write jokes … and ultimately put a series of them together and launched “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, and I’m in Therapy!” at the Shubert Theater in 2006. Fair enough. Where Solomon might be stretching credibility, though, is in his contention that other modern comics have made a habit of stealing his material.
Hmmm. How does that reconcile, I am compelled to ask myself, with my distinctly recalling hearing several of Solomon’s punch lines bandied about well before he was born?
Ah, me! It’s rare that anyone leaves Theatre Three feeling less than satisfied with their theater-going experience, but guess what? I was not the only aficionado eager to depart the comfortable old building when comedian Peter Fogel was taking his final bow. I noticed during Act II, for example, that a fortysomething woman beside me had been texting on her iPhone since intermission. She was apparently determined to conclude her private message even as the star of “…Therapy!” was being applauded politely, if not lustily during the play’s curtain call.
When I looked left and right I saw, alas, that many of our neighbors in Row F Center were doing exactly the same thing. Texting … not applauding.
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Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of ten novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. Ladouceur’s upcoming THE QUANTUM SYNDROME is patterned on the Atlanta child murders of the 80s and will be introduced at Long Island’s famed Book Revue on April 28th.