There's a useful Yiddish word—tsuris (troubles, woes, aggravation, frustration, take your pick)—and Beau Jest is rife with it.
Watching this schlemiel-ish production (proverbially, those who spill the soup), I felt like a genuine schlemazel (one upon whom the soup is spilled).
They could use a good clop en cup (hit in the head).
So-so play (with traditional plot), so-what production (with traditional approach), so why's it the opening appetizer of Las Vegas Little Theatre's mainstage season? And hold onto your knishes—its sequel, Jest a Second, bookends the season in May. Meanwhile, the boldly gay-themed Take Me Out is stuffed somewhere in March.
At a theater striving to hit subscriber goals and knowing its audience, we-thinks we smell, well, niche marketing.
Beau Jest resembles an extended episode of the '60s series, Love, American Style: "Love and the Jewish Parents."
In James Sherman's feeble farce, set in Chicago, Sarah (Melody Ballestero), a young Jewish madel (girl, woman, lady, chick, take your pick) is dating Chris (Curtis Fowler), a shegitz (male who is non-Jewish, gentile, not of the faith, outside the tribe, take your pick) she's hiding from her oy-gevalt!-he's-not-Jewish! parents (Helen Lipton, Charlie Rosenberg). To escape their nagging, Sarah hires actor/escort Bob (Anthony Farmer)—whom she thought was Jewish, but is also a shegitz—to portray her Jewish "doctor" boyfriend.
When the family—plus Sarah's divorced brother Joel (Michael Button) but sans the shunted-off Chris—arrives at Sarah's for dinner, the table is set for sitcom-strength hijinks.
Few genres go splat quite like satire gone flat, and that's when a play is sparkling champagne. Beau Jest is an open, day-old can of 7-Up—it'll do if you're parched for mercy giggles. But lackluster performances in key roles, insultingly simpleminded messages of tolerance, a scattershot script missing momentum and excessive straining for screwball-comic cred severely drain its flavor.
Using co-directors (Ken Feldman and Carl Butto) doubtless contributed to the lack of cohesion.
And if you didn't grow up in this play's model of kvetchy, meta-Yiddish Jewishness, you'll likely feel shut out. I didn't feel shut out, however, and can at least attest to its authentic tone. Within acceptable bounds of exaggeration, Beau Jest plays like every dinner party my parents ever threw—minus the not-so-madcap boyfriend mishegoss (craziness, strangeness, weirdness, absurdity, take your pick)—and that's the only reason I reserve a shred of affection for it. (Well, also Ron Lindblom's warm, earth-toned living-room set.)
So much is so stunningly predictable in this gentile-among-Jews ... make that fish-out-of-water story:
The actor playing a doctor ad-libbing odd answers to questions about ailments from Sarah's parents; the gentile playing the Jew trying to riff his way through Passover seder prayers; Sarah going bug-eyed in panic, then eventually falling for the likable lug; her brother growing suspicious—well, someone has to in these concoctions—while the parents remain blissfully clueless; the abandoned boyfriend determined to declare his love; the pop psychology preaching the severing of domineering parental ties; the conclusion that love conquers religious differences, and people are more than the faiths they observe.
Did you follow along on your plot-contrivance checklist? Get past the obviousness of it all? (Gentile boyfriend named Chris? Just call him Christ and be done with it.)
Most of the performances are mechanical, the characters feeling uninhabited by the actors—Ballestero could only pass for Jewish if Sarah was Sephardic, and even that's a stretch, and Button needs a wake-up shove—with the exception of Lipton and Rosenberg as the parents. But to be fair, they've got the showiest roles as a hectoring Jewish couple whose mild bickering long ago became their second language.
"We were watching Leno Monday night ..."
"Whaddaya talking, it was Tuesday night ..."
"It was MONDAY night ..."
When Mama meets the fake beau, she tells him: "I'm so happy, but Jewish, you don't look."
Papa's got to enter his daughter's home every time announcing: "Took us an hour to find a parking spot!"
They're my mother and father and aunts and uncles and grandfather and grandmother rolled into one giant, multigenerational matzoh ball.
But don't vigorously ponder the plot or you'll wonder why Sarah, knowing her deception has to eventually end, wouldn't figure she'd hurt or anger her parents even more—a fate (and Sarah's half-assed thinking) rendered moot by a too-pat wrap-up.
After the show, in an art-imitates-life-imitates-art moment, an older Jewish woman in the audience was happy to tell me what I thought.
I know what I think:
Beau Jest comes close to turning its characters into a stage-full of nudniks. (We'll let you look that one up, bubbelah.)