Tuesday, March 29, 2011


THEATRE REVIEW: ZERO HOUR
29 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5



Jim Brochu tries to get as close as possible to absolute Zero. And he comes so close, it's positively chilling — a madcap theatrical portrait of the legendary Zero Mostel that is absolutely delightful and, ultimately, deeply moving. Written by and starring Brochu, under the direction of Piper Laurie, the show is called ZERO HOUR and it opened at the Al Green Theatre on Monday, a presentation of the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company.

Set days before his death, in the studio the legendary actor maintained to indulge his passion for painting, ZERO HOUR introduces us to Mostel at the height of his career, full of life and completely oblivious to the little signs that hint that the end of his life is near. Clearly, he's here to indulge his passion for painting — and he resents the intrusion of a New York Times reporter who arrives for an interview.

In one of those awkward conceits that mark the one-man-show genre, ZERO HOUR's audience finds itself playing the hapless journalist — a device that for all its preciousness serves nonetheless to launch Brochu into a rambling vintage Mostel monologue. But not surprisingly, for all its great good humour, that monologue is quickly mired in embittered recollections of the blacklists that grew out of the communist witch-hunts that marked the McCarthy era, and the suffering those lists engendered among Mostel and his politically active friends.

It's a subject worthy of examination, of course — and if ZERO HOUR merely contented itself with retelling the horrors of that era, it would still make for a compelling piece of cautionary theatre, for all that victims don't make for the most compelling theatre. For Brochu, it's only half the story. Dividing ZERO by two acts gives him something delightfully greater than the sum of its parts. For while his first act covers off on the pitfalls of young Samuel Mostel's rise to fame — an immigrant childhood, a failed marriage, a remarriage outside his faith that costs him his family and, of course, the repressive and unconscionable blacklisting he and his friends endured — Brochu gives us a second act about rebuilding, healing and, ultimately, the world on the other side of forgiveness.

This is, of course, the part of Mostel's life with which we are most familiar, his time of triumph in shows such as A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, Rhinoceros and Fiddler on the Roof, and in movies such as The Producers, which he apparently loathed.

But it is a time of healing too — and not just from the lingering effects of an horrific confrontation with an out-of-control bus. When Jerome Robbins is called in to doctor Forum in its out-of-town tryouts, Mostel comes face to face with a man he considers a McCarthy collaborator, and while he never forgets Robbins' transgressions, he puts his anger aside and finds common ground in their shared art. And in finding his version of forgiveness for Robbins, Mostel finds a way to forgive himself too.

Brochu the writer may not have resolved all the kinks in his Act I script, but Brochu the performer fares much better. Under Laurie's direction, he moves far beyond the realm of mere impersonation, inhabiting the character so completely one wonders if there is an exorcist rather than a dresser waiting to help him put the character to bed. Together, writer and performer tell a simple, powerful story of a man who refused to remain a victim and, in the process, gave us ways far beyond the physical to take the measure of a man. By Brochu's reckoning, not a lot of people equal Zero.

No comments:

Post a Comment