The Geffen theater has become a second home to the New York-based playwright Donald Margulies. Now, to continue riding the wave of his popularity, the Geffen has chosen to revive one of his earlier works, The Model Apartment, which had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Theater Center some thirty years ago (and opened at NY’s Primary Stages Company soon afterwards). The Model Apartment is a Holocaust play, one that dramatizes the impact of that calamity on a Jewish family in the late 1980s. Lola (Marilyn Fox) and Max (Michael Mantell) are Holocaust survivors. She was a teenager who watched as the Nazis murdered her family (and others) at Bergen-Belsen; he was a Jew who avoided the death camps by hiding in a forest. The aged, retired couple have left Brooklyn and relocated to Florida, intending to move into a condo and live out the last years of their lives in sunshine and tranquility. Alas, things don’t work out as planned. To begin with, construction work on their condo hasn’t been finished on time, obliging them to move temporarily into the complex’s model apartment instead (one room with a pull-out couch and a non-functioning TV and fridge). But that’s the least of their problems. The biggest and most terrifying one is the unexpected arrival of their daughter, Debby (Annika Marks, in a tour de force performance). Max and Lola’s relationship to Debby forms the dramatic crux of the play. They might have survived the Holocaust, but they are still traumatized and haunted by it; memory will not allow them to forget. Their suffering, however, is something their daughter can’t abide; she simply doesn’t have the sensitivity, the compassion, to sympathize with them. Such a reaction on the part of the “second generation,” is a common one, according to many psychologists, but Margulies takes it to the extreme, making Debby fat, loud and obnoxious. And mentally ill to boot: she has been in and out of institutions, burned through any number of shrinks, been drunk and disorderly, a whacked-out fantasist of the first order. Debby’s babyish, self-destructive behavior provides the play’s fireworks — and much of its humor. Hilarious as she sometimes is, Debby is a pathetic figure, someone suffering from a psychic numbing, a closing-off of feelings prompted, no doubt, by her refusal to be a stand-in for all those people Max and Lola lost in the Holocaust. Debby further tests her parents’ patience and love by inviting her so-called boyfriend, Neil (Giovanni Adams), to come stay with her in the model apartment. Neil is black, homeless and mentally ill himself, a dim bulb who has never even heard of the Holocaust. Yet he too, like Lola, Max and Debby, is haunted by his own demons (drug-addict mother, father in jail, etc.). The traumatized characters in The Model Apartment are pitted against each other for ninety painful, heart-breaking ways, with the past colliding with ferocious power against the present. Skillfully acted by its superb cast, the show — the Geffen’s seventh Margulies outing —also benefits from Marya Mazor’s firm, deft direction.
