Opinion: Wallach Slays 'Em

Eli Wallach holds his audience in the palm of his hand every second of his darkly hilarious performance in "Visiting Mr. Green" at the Union Square Theater in Manhattan.

Photo by James Leynse

At the Sunday matinee this reviewer attended, the laughs were so hearty the man in the next seat nearly fell out of it. Theatergoers whooped with joyful regularity. The show captivated one and all, sweeping them up again and again in waves of delight.

Rarely has there been such mass glee, and seldom has a standing ovation been so clamorous. What was going on?

Star Vehicle

The perfect match of an actor and a role, with an audience getting just what it wanted on a gloomy January afternoon, that's what.

This was a New York crowd, and a distinguished one. Jason Robards and his wife were in the row ahead, while the actress Anne Meara sat across the aisle, colleagues perhaps paying homage to a great performer. The expense-account people were obviously elsewhere.

In the past there used to be "star vehicles" - plays written for a specific actor, the way Philip Barry wrote "The Philadelphia Story" for Katharine Hepburn - and while the practice seems to have died out, one almost suspects "Visiting Mr. Green" was crafted especially for Mr. Wallach.

It's as hard to picture someone else in the role as to imagine Archie Bunker not being played by Carroll O'Connor.

Pay Dirt

According to a program note, Jeff Baron, the playwright, left a successful corporate career to be a writer. He has since worked in film, television, and opera, but this is his first play.

He certainly hit pay dirt with his topic and his star, and didn't do too badly with David Alan Basche either, who plays Ross Gardiner, the callow youth who visits Mr. Wallach's Mr. Green.

Before the house lights dim, the audience sits staring at Loren Sherman's consummately depressing set of a dingy Upper West Side apartment, dreading the tragedy that must surely lie ahead in such a dump.

Community Service

But not to worry. The laughs begin at once, with a loud banging at the door that brings on the disheveled Mr. Green to admit Ross, a dapper Harvard Business School grad with a smart briefcase.

He's come to perform the weekly community service imposed by the judge in a reckless-driving case in which he knocked down but did not harm the jay-walking Mr. Green.

Mr. Green takes one look and throws him out.

In a story line that seems a little too contrived to be believable, of course Ross returns and of course he and Mr. Green become the father and son neither ever had.

Ross wins over the irascible widower with soup from a kosher deli and cements the bond by turning out to be Jewish himself, although non-practicing and amusingly baffled by Mr. Green's rigid dietary laws and mysterious Yiddish expressions.

Saintlike, the young man bears with the old one's cranky eccentricities and maudlin rhapsodies about his wife, Yetta, "59 years and never once an argument." He even cleans up the filthy place.

But when Ross confesses to being gay, that does it. He's a "faigele" - and "Jewish boys are not faigeles," Mr. Green asserts in no uncertain terms.

Redemption

End of relationship? No way. The play is about redemption, and Mr. Baron goes on to milk it for all it's worth in what seems a rather formulaic and sentimental plot the audience adores anyway.

Mr. Wallach's presence lends all the credibility needed for a willing suspension of disbelief, while Lonny Price's brisk direction keeps it rolling

Mr. Basche, who performed "Visiting Mr. Green" with Mr. Wallach at the Coconut Grove Playhouse last spring, clearly knows Ross down to his fingertips, and brings warmth and a touching ardor to his supporting role.

Wallach In Profile

Mr. Wallach, who lives in East Hampton with his wife, Anne Jackson (they met in an Off-Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's "This Property Is Condemned"), scarcely needs any introduction.

The perfect match of an actor and a role.

A foremost interpreter of Williams's work, his long list of distinguished credits includes leading roles in "The Rose Tattoo," for which he won a Tony award, and "Camino Real."

More recently he starred on Broadway with Ms. Jackson in "Cafe Crown." Three years ago, also on Broadway, the couple played Noah and Esther in Clifford Odets's "The Flowering Peach."

In the current production, Mr. Wallach's Mr. Green at first offers rocklike resistance to any invasion of his privacy or reappraisal of his life. As he stands, soldier-straight, his face has a stoic nobility that would look right at home on Mount Rushmore. And as he makes his way down the mountain, he shows us his genius.