The idea of Jason Odell Williams’s play, Handle with Care, is intriguing. How does a DHX delivery guy, living in some remote stretch of Virginia, misplace the corpse of someone’s grandmother? The reasons become clear as the comedy unfolds at Plymouth Church on Milwaukee’s East side. (Plymouth Church has been the temporary roost of Boulevard Theater for its last few productions, after its Bay View home was sold.)
As the play opens, a lovely young woman is yelling (in Hebrew) at a man dressed as a DHX driver. They are in her hotel room. Terrence, the DHX driver, usually doesn’t make deliveries; his job starts and ends at the warehouse. But this is Christmas Eve, and there aren’t any senior people around. Terrence may be inept, but he is not without resources. He phones a childhood friend because he’s Jewish. And he tells him this lady is rattling on “in Jewish.” When the more intelligent, resourceful Josh arrives, he informs Terrence that the woman (Zoe Schwartz) is speaking Hebrew, not “Jewish.” And he admits to understanding very little of the language. Terrence is perplexed. “I thought you had to learn all that stuff in Sunday school, before your Hare Krishna,” he says. After Josh straightens him out on the nuances of the Jewish religion, he begins to understand why the woman is so upset. In Jewish tradition, a person’s body must be buried within a certain number of hours after death. Josh is surprised that he remembers more about his religious upbringing than he thought. As an adult, he is mostly indifferent about religion in general. As Josh creates a strategy for finding the missing corpse (a hoodlum made off with the van at a filling station), he tries to learn more about the girl. Through pantomime and with the aid of a translation guidebook, Josh learns she is from Israel. Ayelet, the girl, was traveling with her grandmother by car and somehow ended up in this town. The grandmother (community theater veteran Christine Lathrop Horgen) appears with Ayelet only in a couple of flashbacks. Horgen is a warm, comforting presence who represents Ayelet’s large, close-knit Israeli family. Grandma has been worried about Ayelet since the girl’s break-up with a longtime boyfriend. She worries that the split caused Ayelet to become withdrawn and depressed. Although Grandma has her own secret reasons for wanting to visit America, she decides a change of scenery would be good for Ayelet, too. In order to give the audience a rest from so much Hebrew, the grandmother and Ayelet speak between themselves in English. Hebrew is reserved for the scenes between Ayelet and the two young men. As Terrance, Hugh Blewett handles his stereotypical character of the dumb hick with more polish than one would expect from such a young actor. His scenes with Mitch Weindorf (Josh) as a pair of old childhood friends are credible. The blossoming romance between Josh and Ayelet (Schwartz) is also nicely handled. Schwartz has put a lot of work into learning pages and pages of Hebrew, and she delivers them convincingly. The chemistry between them grows naturally, despite the play’s oddball circumstances. Handle With Care was written almost 15 years ago, but it didn’t hit Off-Broadway until 2014. No less an actress than Carol Lawrence played the part of the grandmother. (Lawrence is best-remembered for portraying Maria in the original 1957 Broadway production of West Side Story. She also starred in I Do! I Do! and many other shows, as well as films and TV.) Handle with Care played at New York’s Westside Theatre-Downstairs. As the play develops, it reminds one of a Neil Simon comedy. Death, religion and strained family relationships aren’t exactly the perfect topics for humor. But under Mark Bucher’s precise direction, the cast makes these one-liners work.
Terrence continues to search for the body, leaving Josh and Ayelet time to get to know one another. Josh tries to impress Ayelet with his (very bad) impression of Owen Wilson; then chastises himself for looking idiotic. Ayelet, however, is familiar with Wilson from “The Dukes of Hazzard” TV series. Finding common ground in American films, they also trade a few of Jimmy Stewart’s lines from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The affection between them is palpable. And their story continues to be charming, if improbable, all the way to the final curtain in this 100-minute production. Of course, the van (and grandma) eventually are found stuck in a snow bank. All ends well, as a holiday fable should. The whole package is nicely wrapped up in the themes of enduring love and family ties.
