Were CA Critics Impressed by Brooklyn Boy?

Donald Margulies' Brooklyn Boy is set to come to Broadway's Biltmore Theatre on January 13. However, South Coast Repertory, which is co-producing the play with Manhattan Theatre Club, presented the show first. Headlined by Adam Arkin as novelist whose career is on the rise while his personal life is hitting the skids, the world premiere of Brooklyn Boy opened at the Costa Mesa, California theater on September 10. Did area critics think this play should be a bestseller?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Joel Hirschhorn of Variety: "Donald Margulies has an unerring sense of language and the ability to penetrate deeply into the darkness of tangled human emotions. The Broadway-bound SCR world premiere Brooklyn Boy isn't as tightly and cohesively structured as his Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner With Friends. What it offers in abundance are insightful lines and episodes that produce a shock of recognition... The scenes in general could be trimmed, and there's an overall episodic quality that reduces impact until the next confrontation reinvigorates tension."

Don Shirley of The Los Angeles Times: "Donald Margulies ventures into familiar territory in Brooklyn Boy, at South Coast Repertory. His remarkable gift of building characterization through realistic dialogue is undiminished. But his new play, satisfying on most levels, lacks the sense of revelation that we've come to expect from his work… Margulies' mastery of dialogue usually spares him from falling abjectly into clichés. All but one of the play's scenes are duets, and most of these conversations are written with such precision and humor that they serve as a welcome rejoinder to one character who claims that today's audiences 'can't stay glued to a scene for five minutes.'"

Anne Marie Welsh of The San Diego Union-Tribune: "Margulies' beneficent new Brooklyn Boy has mainstream hit written all over it, yet it in no way panders--an important distinction for a playwright whose theme has often been the temptation to artists of selling out. To my mind the funniest and certainly one of his most moving plays, Brooklyn Boy had its world premiere over the weekend at South Coast Repertory. The Broadway-bound production is meticulously directed by Daniel Sullivan, fluently designed by Ralph Funicello, and stars the dolefully delightful Adam Arkin as a gifted, if lovably hapless, novelist and mensch, Eric Weiss. For those unfamiliar with Margulies' work, this comedy delivers the kind of humane pleasures that brought audiences from all over New York City to Broadway during the post-World War II era. For those who have watched Margulies develop over the last 15 years or so, very often with the support of South Coast Rep, Brooklyn Boy offers the subtler pleasure of watching a master deftly weave so many lifelong themes into this comedy-drama's colorful fabric."

Paul Hodgins of The Orange County Register: "Director Daniel Sullivan, a longtime Margulies collaborator, capitalizes on one of the playwright's greatest strengths: his ability to subsume his voice to his characters'. Each relationship plays out naturally; there's no sense of directorial imperatives pushing scenes' emotional arrows this way or that for heightened effect… Those who know Margulies' plays will find his familiar themes here: the inevitable transformations wrought by aging, the complex bonds linking parents and children, the uneasy dance between commercial and artistic success. But like his creation, Eric Weiss, Margulies seems to be placing them in a more elemental context than his earlier work did--the place where both the playwright and the play's main character grew up. How tightly are art and reality intertwined in Brooklyn Boy? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. The story unfolds with an uncanny resonance that distinguishes all great theater, reminding us that nobody's journey through life can be made without some bad decisions, wrong directions or regrets."