VISITING MR. GREEN
By Jeff Baron. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Set design by Eric Levenson. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by John Malinowski. With Sam Gray and Barry Abramowitz. At the Jewish Theatre of New England, Levanthal-Sidman Community Center, Newton Centre, through April 1. The production will then play at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, April 6 through May 6.

If you can imagine Henrik Ibsen writing about the confrontation between an elderly Jewish man in New York and a young, Harvard-educated business hotshot according to the rules of the 19th-century well-made play, you’ll understand why Jeff Baron’s Visiting Mr. Green has some problems. And as if there weren’t enough incongruities between subject and structure, the first-act curtain line reveals that the younger man is gay, changing the tone from ethnic sentimentality to the highly charged emotional outbursts of act two.

Nothing could feel more familiar than the sit-com pairing of two such disparate New Yorkers. The first act sets up the gimmick. The court has sentenced Ross Gardiner to appear at Mr. Green’s apartment once a week for six months as community service for driving his car too fast and plowing into the older man. Mr. Green is an 80-year-old observant Jew who remembers family tales of slights suffered in the old country by his grandparents and orders his life by the Ten Commandments. Ross, a Jew who hasn’t set foot in a temple since his bar mitzvah, doesn’t even know where his grandparents were born. At first, Mr. Green is confused by Ross’s intrusions into his life, then incensed by them. Since his wife passed away, he has stoked his grief by retreating into isolation. Ross woos him by bringing kosher tidbits as peace offerings and being relentlessly cheerful, so that he gradually wins Mr. Green’s affection. You expected otherwise?

The men form a relationship that is rocked when Ross comes out of the closet. Mr. Green has been extolling the virtues of 60 years with his wife, Yetta, and ragging on Ross to find a wife when Ross admits he is gay. Mr. Green doesn’t get it until Ross declares,” You know, a fagele,” the Yiddish word for “little flying bird” that is used disparagingly about gay men.

Trapped by the prejudices of his generation and culture, Mr. Green knows nothing about gay men, and neither can Ross understand the old man’s apathy toward life. He is wary of Mr. Green’s attitudes because of his own family’s disapproval. After a fling with a man named Paul in his early 20s caused his father’s stonewall silence and his mother’s tears, Ross has lived a celibate life. There’s a whiff of “been there, heard that” about his anger over the problems of being gay, not to mention some uneasiness about his whining. Didn’t we see plays like this a decade ago or even earlier? Visiting Mr. Green had its New York premiere in 1997.

Baron sprinkles atmospheric one-liners like matzoh balls floating in chicken soup, but the laughs dry up after Ross’s admission. Then Ross discovers that Mr. Green has secrets of his own. Those favorite Ibsen props, the hidden letters, show up to fuel the turns of the action, with Ross taking the role of deus ex machina. We watch Mr. Green turn into a kindly paterfamilias, changing the patterns of an entire lifetime to accept Ross and his sexuality by wrapping his arms around him in a big bear hug. The play transforms from a Borscht Belt entertainment into a polemic, raising some hot-button issues involving intermarriage and the conflict between being true to one’s religion or one’s family. Mr. Green replaces Ross’s disapproving father and it all ends happily, or reasonably so, because Baron ties up the loose ends at the climax, à la Ibsen.

The two characters would be more believable if they had minds of their own rather than being the playwright’s mouthpieces. Sam Gray as Mr. Green and Barry Abramowitz as Ross have enough trouble keeping up their energy given the episodic structure of the play, which progresses from visit to visit. The four scenes in act one and five in the second act are separated by overlong blackouts; I wish director Daniel Gidron had trusted the audience to understand the dramatic convention of the telescoping of time. Gidron neither varies the length of the scene breaks nor the shape of the staging in ways that would help the actors play anything beyond the outlines.

Adding to the inconsistencies, Eric Levenson’s setting of a one-room apartment somewhere in New York City is a little too smart for Mr. Green’s situation. If he doesn’t know enough to take the plastic wrapping off a sponge when he wipes the table, and if he fills his cabinets with stacks of old paper bags, perhaps the upholstery and the draperies should look a little shabby. And when Ross brings his new-found friend some dinner, couldn’t he include a roll with the plastic cup of soup — and maybe a piece of chicken?

Issue Date: March 29-April 5, 2001