“This is Woody Allen’s first play for Broadway. He was a sitcom writer at the time, so it’s written in that style; it’s very joke-joke-joke-joke, like rapid fire.” Gary Kresca pauses. “It’s just a shame the guy never had a career. Nobody knows who Allen is. So, really, MBCC is just trying to put him on the map.”
How did Betsy (director Betsy Rubino) uncover this obscure playwright, this Allen fellow?
“We’ll have to ask her that question,” says Vic Jeter, “but I think she’s had this one in mind for quite some time.”
Gary Kresca and Vic Jeter have gathered ‘round the campfire, so to speak, to discuss “Don’t Drink the Water,” an early comedy by Woody Allen, that is being staged this weekend and next at the Manhattan Beach Community Church. Kresca plays Walter Hollander, one of the central characters, and Jeter, who has a minor onstage role, has yet a larger offstage roll as co-producer with Nancy Starke.
So, a guy walks into a bar…
It’s the mid-1960s, and every summer Walter has taken his family –wife Marion (Melody Cohen) and daughter Susan (Lindsey Jacobs) – to the Atlantic seaboard. This year, however, his brother-in-law has pulled him aside with what shall prove a costly suggestion. As Kresca tells it, “I had a great time in Europe; why don’t you go behind the Iron Curtain because that’s the only way to see Europe.” Convinced (or duped), the family goes; Walter brings a camera. “I think he takes pictures of some stuff he shouldn’t have, because he’s forthright and he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do.”
The head of the secret police (that’s the dreaded KCRW) thinks they must be spies.
“So they take refuge in the embassy,” Kresca continues, “there in this (unnamed) Eastern European country. They can’t leave because they may be killed, they may be tried, maybe tortured. And then the girl who plays our daughter falls in love with the son of the guy who’s running the embassy in his father’s absence.”
This makes it seem that Lindsey Jacobs herself, not her character, fell in love with the ambassador’s son. When I get her phone number – hey, maybe she’s on Facebook! – I’ll be sure to shake out some answers.
“Walter’s a caterer by trade from New Jersey,” Jeter explains, “and his wife is a professional mahjong player; and his daughter Susan is a bit of a bohemian.”
Susan is also engaged to be married to a lawyer, a man her father seems to adore.
“But then she meets this guy at the embassy who can barely tie his shoes,” Kresca says. “So you can imagine her parents’ reaction.” He hesitates. “We don’t want to give away too much of the plot.”
As long as you don’t tell any of the jokes, we’re fine.
Although the Hollander family has found refuge in the embassy, the ambassador (Steve DeForest) isn’t around – he’s temporarily back in the States.
“He leaves his son Axel (Jarrod Gutman) in charge,” Jeter says, “and Axel has been kicked out of almost all the embassies in the world because he’s so inept. And then there’s the other assistant, Kilroy (Jeff Caldwell), who should have been left in charge.”
“This embassy’s a quiet outpost where nothing happens,” adds Kresca, “and as soon as the son is left in charge and the father leaves, everything happens.”
Naturally, the narrator of the show is a priest (Jack Messenger), who’s been seeking asylum for several years. Are we sure the Marx Brothers didn’t have a hand in this?
How and why it works
“Don’t Drink the Water,” which premiered in 1966, was Woody Allen’s first play, its early sibling being “Play It Again, Sam.”
“It’s sort of formulaic for Woody Allen at that time,” Kresca says, “because there’s the love interest and then there’s these wild characters that kind of dance around that.”
“The ‘60s are definitely in there with some of the lines, some of the names,” Jeter says. So anybody who was in the ‘60s… I guess if you were there, you didn’t remember.”
That’s right! If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there.
The humor in the play is virtually nonstop. Pure W.A., uncorked. What this means is that not only must the cast learn their lines, they’ve got to master the delivery, the pacing, and thus keep the audience locked in.
“You don’t want to let ‘em up out of their seats for a second,” Kresca says. “So the timing in that kind of thing, and the physical comedy involved, really takes a lot of practice.
“Woody Allen has a specific timing. If you read any of his plays, his rhythms are very evident in the speech of his characters. It’s fun to play around with that rhythm and make it your own, and put that big Jersey accent on top. It’s just fun.”
Looking back on “Don’t Drink the Water,” Allen himself has reservations: “It should have been less of a jokey cartoon,” he told Eric Lax in Conversations with Woody Allen. He’d been trying to emulate George S. Kaufman. “[I]t’s not a great play… Not even a good play. But it’s [pause] an easy laugh vehicle. If you’re ready to suspend your critical judgment, it’s an evening of laughs, even if the PTA is doing it.”
Nailing it down
An evening of laughs. So be it.
Kresca and Jeter praise the cast, some of whom are church members and some of whom will presumably roast in pits of fire on Judgment Day. They’ll think: Should have joined MBCC while I had the chance.
“I’ve been involved in [theatrical] productions at the church since 1987,” Jeter says, “and this is probably one of the best ensemble casts we’ve put on the stage… and don’t print that because I don’t want to alienate anybody.”
Note to Carlos in the Philippines: Be sure to edit this from the transcript.
“It goes by really fast,” Jeter says of the play. “If we’re doing our job right the audience won’t realize that was an hour and ten minutes or whatever.”
The play has been well rehearsed. So that the cast would bond – because, after all, chemistry is king – they had a party where everyone came in character and brought dishes that each thought their character would have chosen.
Jeter proceeds to list the upcoming schedule of rehearsals: “Got Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then Friday and Saturday.”
Puzzled, Kresca looks at him for a long moment, and then bursts out laughing.
In the same breath, Jeter has seamlessly segued from rehearsals into actual performances.
“Yeah, folks! Come see a rehearsal by Vic Jeter,” Kresca says, still laughing. “Everybody’s invited.”
Kresca then explains how he and Melody Cohen, who plays his wife, finessed their roles.
“We found it very important that our banter be quick and very familiar… This is the way these people talk and they’ve been married a long time; and people that are married a long time have their own sort of language, right?
“I was able to draw on my own parents,” he continues. “My parents were not really known to make out on a street corner very often, or at all, but showed that they loved one another with a simple pat or a nice meal. It’s cold, bring a jacket. Melanie and I have been playing around with that, because we’re both brash characters and we’re big and we’re huge, but we show that we care about one another in simple ways.”
Note to Carlos in the Philippines: Ditch those seamy pix of Kresca’s folks, will you?
“Don’t Drink the Water” is Gary Kresca’s third appearance with the church theater, but for Vic Jeter it’s his 19th show over the past 25 years. He didn’t have aspirations to become an actor, so how did he get lured into it?
“My boss at the time,” Jeter explains, “said, ‘Hey, we do these productions over at the church; how would you like to go onstage?’ I said, ‘I’m not an actor, I’ve never done that stuff before.’ And the boss replied: ‘You know what? We have a cast party – after every show we have a cast party.’”
Jeter’s response: “I’m there.”
After a quarter of a century he hasn’t tired of them yet.
The ensemble (and additional partygoers) also includes Jeff Wallin, Caroline Rice, Chuck Chastain, Bill Bundy, Lyn Coulter, JC Edwards, Pat Edwards, Patty Jarvis-Bennett (the Patty and Pat of least resistance?), Frank Pepito, and Connor Rafferty.
Don’t Drink the Water opens tomorrow (Friday) in the Manhattan Beach Community Church Theater, 303 S. Peck Ave., MB. It plays this Friday and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m. It also plays on Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, also at 8 p.m. Tickets, $15. Contact Nancye Ellington at (310) 379-3139 or MBCCtheater@yahoo.com. ER
