Insider Outsider Man

Author

By Jeff Smith

Publish Date

July 1, 2009

The North Coast Rep took a huge risk, on paper at least. Tom Dudzick’s Over the Tavern has roles for four children, ranging from 8 to 16. The safe choice: find teenage-ish actors (i.e., twentysomething), dress them young, and rely on their skills to make the characters believable. It’s been done many times — often with success, though just as often with the sense of a “stretch” — a playing down, or perking up — involved.

NCRT accepted the challenge. They cast actors the same age as the four Pazinski children. Kids! Eddie is 15; James Patterson, who plays him, is there or thereabouts. Same with Abbey Howe’s young Annie and Thor Sigurdsson’s mentally challenged Georgie. Along with seasoned technique and David Ellenstein’s smart direction, they connect with their characters’ questions and woes as if playing a twin.

This is especially true of Ian Brininstool’s Rudy. Both are 12 years old. Tavern takes place in Buffalo, New York, in 1959. Rudy has begun to see a widening gap between the Baltimore Catechism and the outside world. “Why,” he asks, “does God allow kids to steal change from blind Elmo’s newsstand?” Rudy has begun to “think” and “ask questions,” suspect habits in the late ’50s (expect him in ten years to have waist-length hair and an anti-war placard held high). Brininstool may not have Rudy’s specific concerns — 50 years later — and probably never saw Father Knows Best or Ozzie and Harriet or American Bandstand. But his puzzlement comes from an authentic — and often hilariously funny — place.

As impressive, Brininstool never plays for a laugh. He is character- (not audience-) driven. He already knows how to create a moment and then let it go — a lesson many actors take much longer to learn.

Tavern feels like a spin-off of late-’50s family comedies. But instead of idealized fathers always at home, always attentive, even when reading the paper (throw in My Three Sons and Leave It to Beaver), the playwright injects Chet Pazinski. He runs a tavern below their apartment, where his abusive father depletes the stock. Chet had hopes — could pitch a wicked curveball — but lost them in an “accident.” Now he rules his roost with what verges on psychological torment.

Matt Thompson handles a tough assignment as Chet: the play plugs genuine emotions into a sitcom veneer. So Thompson can’t, say, De Niro the role with menace. He must maintain a balance, which he does, though on occasion the script — the end, in particular — makes him jump impossible hurdles.