My Mother, My Father and Me

Lillian Hellman believes that accurate criticism is kinder than false praise, and her treatment of middle-class Jews is the kindest to head for Broadway in a long time.

Adapting Burt Blechman's novel, How Much? into a twenty-four scene farce, Miss Hellman imparts humor and meaning to characters, who in the book are haphazardly petty and distasteful. The play examines a family who formally seem to fulfill a television version of acceptable behavior, cute foibles, happy live... and judges them substantively immoral, destructive and miserable.

Father Halpern (Walter Matthau) is a shoe manufacturer who bungles the business devices that everyone else succeeds with (like exploiting tax loopholes and war scares). He is not the Little Man, but a small-scale tax self-consciously. His wife (Ruth Gorevader; not poor, just going bankrupt don) is a silly woman whose mother-love is gauged in terms of what she can buy her son, whose purpose in life is to get bargains, and whose problems are valued at the going Psychiatric rates. "Me," their son Berney, still wants to "find himself" at twenty-six. He hopes to do this by inspiration rather than work, and by helping humanity instead of making a living.

The criticism that America's most insightful writer tenders here is valuable, to the point, and necessary. She hits at the substance of middle-class self-deceit, not merely its forms... money, not "pressures," conformist lives, not conformist clothes or appliances. Fortunately, Hellman's skill is such that the power of the criticism serves to accelerate the pace and broaden the spirit of farce. And for all its commentary the play is invariably funny.

There is a tendency among Jews to laugh off the elements of their culture that are in fact ugly. The most vulgar financial preoccupation has been made the substance of frivolity: witness the well-paid boor, Allan Sherman. At the same time, there seems to be a process of counter-assimilation (to the extent that a nation's theater and humor are an index of its culture, America is becoming increasingly 'Jewish'). The country is adopting only those strains of Jewish culture that reenforce its own social outlook--substitution of financial concerns for humane ones, the apotheosis of anonymity and conformity--not the traditional respect for scholarship or the attitude toward learning.

Miss Hellman, whose plays have often touched on questions of money, family and religion (it becomes clear why the novel attracted her), is well-suited to oppose this tendency. Her work is humorous, but the laughter it evokes is critical. It portrays Jews to expose their aberrations rather than excuse them.

There is an obvious risk in presenting such unattractive Jewish characters. Broadway audiences have shown little inclination to take criticism in the past, and without newspaper critics to tell them to take it (and like it), they might, pardon the expression, rebel. Matters are not helped by Miss Gordon, who exaggerates Rona Halpern beyond the demands of farce, and of Walter Matthau who does nothing but impose a televised quality on the Halpern living room. As Berney, however, Anthony Holland ekes out all the sympathy possible and Lily Darvas is similarly good as the grandmother whom the Halperns briefly tolerate, then ship off to an old-age home.

One subject that Miss Hellman treats with particular humor and good sense is the uneasy relationship between post-ghetto Jews and Negroes. The play opens with Berney singin' on his guitar "De life of a nigger ain't much good..." a point to which the Halpern maid, who overhears him, speaks with some feeling. In a later scene, Berney urges social action on a Negro who mugs him, more or less to shut him up. As these two episodes perhaps suggest, there is considerable overlap in the construction. Since a scene or two might be cut in the process of tightening-up, it seems like a good idea to see the play now while it still has a zany tone and a sense of overflowing satire.

My Mother, My Father and Me is the fourth work Miss Hellman has adapted for the stage. Collected with Montserrat, The Lark, and Candide it would fill a tidy volume. Louis Kronenberger seems the logical man to add an introduction on the playwright's style of adaptation.