The Jewish family plays of James Sherman are made of the simplest stuff: a little laugh, a little cry, a touch of schmaltz. They’re never overwhelming, they’re never drop-dead fantastic.
Yet because they have heart, and skill, and because Sherman has all the details right, they hit home hard, and they touch us with their gentle, tried and true sentiment.
“Door to Door,” Sherman’s new work at Victory Gardens Theater, continues his string of folk wisdom plays, this time concentrating on the women of his family.
His theme, expressed in a recorded popular song played just before the second act, is that, though times change, our destiny is still to become our parents.
To demonstrate, he presents three generations of Chicago women, in a group portrait spanning 1936 to 1999. Far apart in attitudes though they may be, his three women follow a pattern of family and tradition that binds them in love.
Bessie, the oldest, who immigrated to this country from Russia, is still haunted by nightmares of the pogrom. Mary, her child, is a good girl, brought up on the rules and folk wisdom her mother carried over from “the other side,” but yearning to break away from some of the old ways and restrictions. Deborah, her daughter, has become the new, independent career woman, a successful writer, divorced and raising a daughter on her own.
Yet, as Sherman makes clear in the speech patterns and habits of these very different women, they’re very much alike. In a loving snapshot, he brings them all together for one final, sweet look.
The play, directed unobtrusively but firmly by Dennis Zacek, takes place in designer Timothy Morrison’s simple living room setting, with photographs of the women highlighted in the background. A shift in Geoffrey Bushor’s lighting design is all it takes to indicate a change in time and place.
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The dialogue, though it rises to a startling climax when Bessie delivers a passionate denouncement of the prettified world of “Fiddler on the Roof,” is often just small talk, bits of gossip and motherly advice dotted with Sherman’s characteristic good humor and sprinkled with Chicago references. It sometimes meanders and drifts off, and Sherman occasionally repeats a joke once too often. But he skillfully weaves the little speeches together with growing emotional force, and a nice little moral at the end.
His cast is lovely. Cheryl Rose Mitchell portrays, with sweetness and sadness, the middle woman, Mary, the doggedly devoted wife and mother whose whole life has been given over to “doing for” someone else. Kim Wade, a model of attentiveness, is her bright, loving daughter, insecure and vulnerable in her freedom.
Roslyn Alexander has been a muse for Sherman since she appeared in his 1985 hit “The God of Isaac,” and she does not let him down. Her Bessie is cranky, querulous, superstitious, prejudiced and silly, but she is also a valiant, brave woman, and, as the playwright intended, we soon see the true grit that has carried her through life.
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“Door to Door”
When: Through Dec. 19
Where: Victory Gardens Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Phone: 773-871-3000