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As the famous saying might go, "All unhappy families are
unhappy in their own way." As it turns out on stage at the Atlantic Theater, Woody
Allen's family was unhappy in the urban, Jewish way memorialized by the likes of Malamud
to Roth to Allen himself. Woody Allen, the boy, in A Second Hand Memory never
reveals how he will be father to the man. And that's the trouble with this play. Neither
the young hero nor anyone around him exhibits a trace of the wit, temperament,
consciousness, generally acerbic take on the world that makes, has made, Woody Allen a
household name. We hardly expect the boy to toss out the well honed bites (in both senses)
that come second-nature to his adult persona. We do, however, expect to hear something of
the quick undercut, the intellectual or self deprecating aside, perhaps even to catch a
glimpse of Allen the future nebbish who will romance the girl with glasses. But none of
these Allens appear.
This family lives in an apartment house called the Excelsior in
Rockaway, New York--lower middle-class Jewish territory. The father has affairs, though
he's a bit long in the tooth for credibility as a philanderer. The unmarried sister is a
borderline alcoholic and he, the aspiring playwright, keeps his eye on Hollywood. Why not?
May as well aim high if you feel a failure. A visit to the old neighborhood supplies the
occasion for the play. He's broke; he hopes to borrow a stake from his brother-in-law for
a new show; his wife is pregnant; and now he thinks he's not the marrying type.
What? Everything about this version of Allen history certainly feels
"second hand," meaning second time around, including this stab at revising an
arc of memory. In fact, this is Allen's twelfth play script and it feels wrung from the
life of eleven others. There aren't any jokes either. The father wraps himself in
daydreams about his dysfunctional family. There's a nice metaphoric touch to the plot when
it turns to the robbery of the family's safe, pretty much the only interesting event in
the play. The father thinks it was an inside job, since the safe's combination is known
only to himself and one son. So they're bankrupt, or the second generation is bankrupt due
to carelessness in the first.
Even the family's individual failures' feel tired, like wearying bits
of action or dialogue retrieved from the cutting room floor. Sadness at every turn. Yet it
did not generate sympathy or even, heavens forfend, pity for these people. They are
likeable, but not enough to create an outsider's interest in them; they are forbearing,
but not forbearing enough to be cheerful in rough times; they are down, but not far enough
down to be remarkable in that neighborhood; they probably are even historically accurate,
but that surely matters less to a dramatized memoir than the emotional cause and effect
drama worth its ticket.
By repute, Americans thrive on biography, especially on the most
intimate events in celebrities' lives. Childhood, however, provides little or no settings
for intimacy, which implies adulthood, and child stars chiefly interest their older selves
and their parents. Allen used this trick of telling the boy's life through the man's eye
in his film, Broadway
Danny Rose. The narrators in his films usually suggest their maturity relative to
the footloose, young man they describe. Annie
Hall is another one such.
Allen geography has been well traversed over the past fifteen or so
years and there is no new mine or memorial in this particular patch of ground. There have
been good memory plays--–by Arthur Miller, by Tennessee Williams, by Ibsen, and
others, but they surveyed a rich past that we knew would flower in a due course. That is
not the case here. Allen's past feels unremarkable when not thin, while the present is
enacted sans plot, sans dramatic conflict, sans developed character, sans anything.
New York, November 30, 2004 - Nina daVinci Nichols
