Couple things. Give me cash and a deadline and I’ll write any truth.
I have many handicaps but expertise is not one of them.
From June 14, 1989 – JDW
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.― Benjamin Disraeli
The Rose City premiere of the Neil Simon play Broadway Bound has been extended for another week.
Meaning you might yet still get to see Catherine Wolf’s astounding performance. If you can score a ticket.
I got mine the easy way; Norma Louise arranged it.
Seems one afternoon she was in one of those fashionable dress shops on fashionable Northwest 23rd Street – Myra’s – and happened to meet a lovely woman with a distinctive East Coast accent.
For some reason, I picture the two of them “accessorizing.” A verb never used by males of my acquaintance.
I think it’s like when you put mudflaps on your pickup.
Anyway, the next thing I know, we’re sitting in the Portland Repertory Theatre, an intimate 230-seat auditorium at 25 S.W. Salmon.
I was struck first by the set design. Created by Thomas Buderwitz, it’s a two-story interior of a home that looks like it’s been lived in for maybe thirty-five years. Maybe fifty. Longer even, because it could’ve been Grandpa’s house.
I felt like I’ve been in that house before. I’ve never actually lived there, but I know I must have visited plenty of times.
Broadway Bound is the last of Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, which includes Brighton Beach Melodies and Biloxi Blues.
The three plays tell the story of Eugene, a poor Jewish boy from Brooklyn who wants to grow up to be a writer.
Me, too!
In Broadway Bound, Eugene is a young man, twenty-three-years-old. struggling to sell a sketch to a radio comedian. He’s teamed up with his older brother Stanley, who’s convinced their future lies with this new invention… television. Stan thinks TV will be BIG someday.
It’s winter. February or March, 1949. There’s snow on the roof and it’s cold outside.
It’s cold inside the house, too. Grandfather Ben, the socialist, has separated from his wife, who’s off to Florida with their wealthy daughter Blanche. That’s no life for him.
“Comfort doesn’t make me happy,” he says. Ben is seventy-seven. He’s always lived his life one way, and it’s too late to begin living it differently.
The parents, Jack and Kate, are having problems. Another woman. Of course, as we all know, that’s usually the symptom, not the disease.
Jack denies it, of course. “There’s nothing waiting out there for me, except something else.” Obviously, this is one of those marriages that lasted only as long as the family did. It’s breaking-up time.
Kate is the glue that keeps the Jerome family together, and she’s not about to surrender without a struggle. “We’re women,” she points out the obvious, then adds, “We don’t know any better.”
Catherine Wolf is the glue that keeps this play together. When Jack shouts, “There’s no other woman!”, Wolf snaps a response as if she had been there eavesdropping when Simon’s mother said it herself forty years ago. “Then stop it anyway.”
She’s a powerful actress, a performer who can soar and float, who can rise and fall, who can take the audience with her as she becomes that mother, that wife, that lover… that very human being. Wolf is gifted, and Simon has written a superb role which requires a superb actress. Wolf takes this play and wraps it around her much like Kate clutches this family to her bosom, and she holds on tight.
Catherine Wolf is very good.
When the lights dimmed, the curtains closed and the makeup came off, I began to fully appreciate Miss Wolf’s talent.
She isn’t Kate. Not by a long shot.
“I have to tell you the truth,” she confided, early in late night conversation at Rose’s. “I was so happy to sign with a play in a town that has a Nordstrom. It’s my favorite store.”
Kate never shopped at Nordies’.
“I love creating a character,” Wolf answered when asked if there are reasons to pursue her craft other than plenty of time for shopping. “I love finding something of that woman inside of myself and sharing it, so that the character comes alive.”
Wolf usually works live. Sure, she’s co-starred in an episode of “Cagney & Lacy.” She also did a Movie Of The Week with Dennis Weaver – “Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction.” And currently she can be seen in some parts of the country in a commercial for Pillsbury Bread Sticks. That’s show biz.
But she’s not the Hollywood-type. “I like earning the money you can make in film, don’t get me wrong,” she cautions, perhaps contemplating that next department store display window. “But I love the stage.”
The stage hasn’t always reciprocated such affection. In her Broadway debut, Wolf Played Claire Bloom’s understudy in “The Innocents.” The director was none other than the illustrious Harold Pinter. The cast was flown to England to rehearse. On opening night, Wolf’s dressing room was so full of flowers, “I could barely get in. I thought, I’d made it big. I told myself, ‘This is it.'”
The show closed seven days later.
That disappointment may be the one she calls to mind as she plumbs here soul every evening – except Monday – looking for just the right memory to bring Kate to life.
“I work from the inside out,” she relates. “It’s not an easy part to play. It’s physically very difficult… I don’t like to do anything that’s fake, so I actually make myself angry or sad. I think about my dead cat… my dead brother… whatever it takes. That’s why I like Mondays. It’s the one day I don’t have to cry.”
It sounds like a tough way to make a living. “I love it. I love it,” she repeats. “When you do something well, when you touch people, that’s a very exciting feeling.”
It’s a feeling Catherine Wolf must experience every time she walks onto the stage.
SEE THE PLAY.
But you should really hear her tell about the time she danced with George Raft.
Epilogue. I don’t remember, well, any of this. The play, Miss Wolf, late night conversation at Rose’s.
But I am betting, you could cut the sexual tension with a dull blade.
Double or nothing, it was all mine.