Todd Sussman’s HIM at the Schoolhouse Theater: Wherefore Art Thou, Play?

David Begelman

HIM, a two-character drama written and directed by Todd Sussman, has all the earmarks of an unfinished work. When and if completed, it will in all likelihood stand as only a more polished—rather than choppy and tedious—ode to incoherence. Sorry to say, the drama hardly even begins to deliver something an audience can absorb as digestible theater.

Mr. Sussman’s writing suggests he has been stewing—as well we all might be—over the historical treatment of Jews. But the playwright’s preoccupation with the theme hardly does it justice. Rather, his anger over the world’s record of intolerance is morphed into a rambling monologue by a Jewish janitor in a museum, a hapless fellow who seems lost in a time warp, and who can’t make up his mind about whether life is funny, tragic, or somewhere in between.

Janitor, responding to the provocative comments of a Monitor who is out of sight until later on in the 90-minute play, reacts to the latter in a flurry of observations that are a mishmash of reminiscences, accusation, rant, and stand-up comedy adorned with emotional pratfalls. It all hangs together as gorgeously as an assortment of wash on a multi-national clothesline.

This is not to say that Mr. Sussman is incapable of the well-timed quip, or the mordant observation that is right on target. But such points of contact with the audience fall victim to sprucing up a narrative that is unremittingly obscure, and, because of this, difficult or impossible to wrap one’s head around. The result is a monologue that seems to go nowhere, if not one with a thrust oblivious to all except, possibly, the playwright himself.

Janitor (played with energy by Steve Vinovitch) inhabits a museum hall in which Eygptian mummies and other artifacts have been on display. One of these is a golden casket from which Janitor draws such items as the tallis, phylacteries, and black overcoat and hat familiar as orthodox or Hasidic apparel. He dons them sporadically to score points about anti-Semitism, while waxing ironic about his own lot.

Janitor’s humor is often raunchy, but more often than not, rather trite. Reprising a number from A Chorus Line, he sings, “One little circumcision, every little step he takes…” or another ditty, “I’ll see me in my dreams…” sung to the lilt of the familiar ballad.

At other times, Janitor verges on a Henny Youngman comedic tack: “I’m a substandard Jew in every respect, whose mother asked me to memorize the New Testament,” or “My mother never went to a synagogue unless there was free food.”

Many of Janitor’s one liners are funny, but scarcely sufficient to redeem a work that suddenly switches to jarringly darker themes, like “spreading seed so everyone looks like the dirty, dirty…dirty Jew.” Such ominous laments alternate with lighter fare like the story of the Texan girl who dreamt she had a bat mitzvah, or the voice of Janitor’s mother, Esther, recapitulating her son’s days of baseball glory  (when people on occasion forget his name, he wishes they’d call him “Sandy Koufax” rather than “Hyman Lipschitz”), or making observations about his underwear.  

When Monitor makes a visible appearance on stage toward the end of the play, he is abjectly apologetic about his treatment of Janitor as the latter’s unseen nemesis. Whereas before, Monitor was “overjoyed to be the target of your venom,” now in the flesh he goes down on his knees to beg forgiveness for his maltreatment of Janitor.

Janitor and Monitor’s face-off runs an inscrutable gamut from choking and displays of karate to mutual commiseration and bonding, none of which really explains what subtext the playwright is supposedly dramatizing.    

The Janitor’s ire over anti-Semitism is ostensibly backed up by a book he flaunts. It is none other than A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, a somewhat mixed blessing as inspirational text. The author, a conservative Catholic, implied that prophets like Isaiah foretold the arrival of Jesus Christ (a contested, and for obvious reasons hardly a rabbinical interpretation of Old Testament scripture), or that he was a follower of Hillel, although there is no evidence for this surmise. Johnson also disparaged the works of Spinoza as a “destructive Jewish spirit.” Janitor’s ironic and often biting attitude toward anti-Semitism might perhaps have been better served by relying on works by Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, or Hannah Arendt.

Both Mr. Vinovich and Lee Lobenhofer (who plays Monitor) make valiant attempts to do justice to the drama, and their characterizations often enliven an otherwise impenetrable script.

Shortly after Monitor presents himself to Janitor on stage, a swing descends mysteriously near them, a conceit showing promise of a Samuel Beckett-type engagement of two characters. No such luck. They once again go back to either browbeating or nursing each other, as if the abrupt fits and starts that catapult them in opposite directions or else glue them together were somehow equivalent to exploring depths of philosophical profundity. I doubt it.

David Pentz’s Lighting Design, Matt Stine’s Sound, and John Pollard’s minimalist set were all equal to a task. But what, after all, was the task of which Sussman speaketh?

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