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Boomie
Katz By the time the audience meets Larry Katz as the title character in Boomie Katz (playing until March 30 at the Bitter Truth Playhouse), he's a grumpy old man with no one left to live for and nothing left to care about. His bitterness plays out in his longtime hobby of rattling off names of Holocaust victims to an annoyed God, who sends Boomie's dead brother (Allen Bloomfield) to Earth in an effort to curb the hobby, thus (presumably) stopping God's guilt. But Boomie ignores his brother's pleas and continues on his mission to honor the dead--a mission that often flashes him back to his days in the Auschwitz ghetto where he lost a son. Enter Coop (David Johann), an ostensible junkie with a foul mouth and bellyful of bitterness of his own, and watch the transformation begin. Written by Murray
Wolfe, Boomie Katz is certainly ambitious, as it attempts to bridge
generations, religions, cultures and classes through its often touching,
often funny and always smartly written dialogue. The script is well paced
and the characters fairly well developed, particularly Boomie, who, at
the end of his life, realizes that he still has something left to learn.
The onstage bickering between Boomie and his brother is also believable,
if not downright familiar to anyone with a sibling. But perhaps the play's
greatest asset is its ability to evoke emotion without a great show of
pretense. Wolfe successfully employs understatement to punctuate Boomie's
disillusionment with God. The flashbacks to Auschwitz are filled with
dialogue containing horrific imagery. Perhaps the only
criticism one could have about Boomie Katz is that it's very much
a play by Jews for Jews, which is not surprising given that the NoHo Jewish
Theatre League put on the production. But the script is oftentimes too
peppered with Yiddish words and singularly Jewish themes, losing some
of the universality that is any good production's goal. ####
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