ZERO HOUR Full Press Page
Metro Weekly - 4 Stars!
Zero to Hero
Questions from the past play into our present -- and future -- in Theater J's Zero Hour and Woolly Mammoth's Eclipsed.
by Tom Avila
Published on September 10, 2009
On Oct. 14, 1955, the actor and comedian Zero Mostel was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was asked if he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He was asked, in a phrase that is as unsettling today as it was then, to ''name names.''
Established in the late 1930s, HUAC's mission was to investigate individuals and organizations with alleged ties to the Communist Party. The committee paid particular attention to entertainers, those individuals whose voices were heard loudly and widely. HUAC's work would later be rightly seen as a modern-day witch hunt, destroying lives and careers in the name of some unfounded greater good.
Jim Brochu's one-man show Zero Hour, the season opener at Theater J, takes that single transformative day in Mostel's life and uses it to tease open a biography that is as fascinating as it is startlingly rich.
Heartfelt and humorous, Zero Hour exercises a pleasing restraint in its storytelling by using the simplest of frames. Mostel is in his painting studio, giving an interview to a New York Times reporter. The set-up allows Brochu to take full advantage of both Mostel's complex personal history and wildly entertaining, quirky public persona. He jokes, reminisces and reveals in a fashion that is natural and uncontrived.
Brochu is an exceptionally talented writer and this play thrives because of his equal skills as an actor. He also manages the difficult act of investing in the life of an iconic figure without needlessly romanticizing him. (Though Brochu does step into the trap of indulging rather than editing in terms of the play's length.)
Even as we revisit that day in front of the committee, we see a man who was not trying to be a hero or make some grand political statement. Mostel was a citizen frustrated by the ridiculousness of HUAC and angered by its indignity and waste. Brochu gives us the truth of the moment and the man, and allows those echoes to resonate satisfyingly in our own time.
Washington Jewish Weekly
Modern-day morality play
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent
The clown prince of Broadway was an angry man. Funny man Zero Mostel, it seems, had a bitter streak that adds heft and intrigue to actor, creator, writer Jim Brochu's one-man bio-drama, Zero Hour, which explores the life of the rubbery-faced actor.
Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Brochu has the oversize dimensions, literally the weight and heft, to carry off a more-than-believable Mostel impersonation. But Brochu offers more than an off-the-shelf impersonation of the character comedian with his bulgy eyes, grimaces, grins and groaners. At the end of 90 minutes, Brochu has become a reincarnation of the late, great Mostel, a one-of-a-kind stage presence -- famed for his Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Onstage at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's Goldman Theater through Sept. 27, Zero Hour introduces us to a man who lived life with a vengeance. In the guise of a newspaper interview with an unseen New York Times reporter, Mostel's story unfolds over two acts.
This is Mostel late in life and he terms himself a painter who only took acting and comedy gigs to pay for his paints and canvases. Throughout the evening, Brochu sketches and paints. He notes in passing that he was just back from London where he filmed an appearance with Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy for a Muppet Show episode. That places Zero Hour in 1977, the year the larger-than-life actor died.
But Zero Hour goes beyond a dry study of the rise of a successful actor, lauded from Broadway to Hollywood. Brochu captures the intense fear and uncertainty of living through McCarthyism, for Mostel was one of many performing artists -- Jewish and otherwise -- brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee between 1947 and 1956.
Mostel, like many who appeared before HUAC -- in 1955 -- was asked to "name names." He understood the repercussions of such actions and the lives and careers that could be shattered if Communist Party affiliations were publically revealed. In fact, among the most touching moments is one when Mostel describes the devastating outcome being named a communist had on his close friend, actor Phil Loeb.
Mostel also recounts the origins of his well-known animosity toward director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, one of a few who unrepentantly named names. Mostel famously refused to shake hands or speak with Robbins, who said he named names for fear of being outed as a homosexual in the repressive 1950s.
But, when Robbins was brought in to work on Forum, Mostel acquiesced -- Robbins was, he allowed, a genius as a show doctor -- and they worked together there and on Fiddler: "I don't blacklist," Mostel declared.
The kernel of Zero Hour rests in Mostel's account of the McCarthy witch hunt, which he characterizes as an inquisition against Jewish artists. He contended that it was the Jews, outsiders in the then WASP-dominated United States, whom McCarthy and his supporters were after.
For a man of Mostel's generation, son of immigrants, being questioned just a decade after the Holocaust decimated European Jewry, it becomes a believable, even incendiary proposition, especially so in Brochu's hands as a Mostel alter-ego.
The sting still resonates a half century after McCarthy. Most American Jews, indeed, as a community and individuals, feel completely at home in their multicultural 21st century country. But witch hunts of other sorts abound these days, whether from the conservative right or the liberal left -- just open up a newspaper to confront the political and cultural divisions that have bisected America just in the past few months.
Brochu has wrought, aside from an uncanny impersonation of a larger-than-life man with googley eyes, great girth, a graying beard and slicked-down comb-over, a modern-day morality play that compels viewers to re-examine our own era for 21st-century witch hunts.
After he leaves Washington, Brochu brings his play Zero Hour to New York for an off-Broadway run; so don't miss a chance to see a star performance on the rise.
Washington City Paper
Zero Hour: A hilarious paean to the indefatigable Zero Mostel.
By Trey Graham
Jim Brochu is Zero Mostel: the shrugging, the mugging, the right hand aloft to screw in that invisible light bulb, the eyes bugging as if to say “What, that’s the best laugh you’ve got?” The two-tone beard, the thinning hair scraped back to front, the screwed-up face, the waggling jowls—and those cadences, pinched and outraged, punchy and perfectly pitched. As a comic, Mostel had no peer, and as a mimic, Brochu does his hero proud: When it’s going for the funny bone, Zero Hour is a laff riot, down to the “I’m a little teapot” imitation excavated from Mostel’s early days in stand-up.
And that’s terrific, because most of us know Mostel merely as the guy to whom funny things happened in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, or as the guy who celebrated “Tradition” above all in Fiddler on the Roof. (Or—much to the actor’s chagrin, Brochu insists—as the sweaty swindler of a Broadway hack romancing wealthy widows in The Producers.) Brochu wants you to know Mostel the Brooklyn boy, Mostel the Hollywood blacklist survivor, and Mostel the man who nearly lost his leg in a 1960 bus crash—and masked the pain night after night onstage.
The blacklist outrage is where Brochu focuses his energy and his character’s famously volcanic ire, but that last gruesome story makes for one of Zero Hour’s better set pieces—and make no mistake, the evening is a series of set pieces, stories strung like pearls on the thin conceit of an interview with an invisible journalist. (He’s sitting, apparently, in the audience’s lap, which explains why Brochu’s Zero keeps talking directly to us.)
Hackneyed, that device? Yes. Predictable, the evening’s rhythms? More than once. But Zero Hour is a loving tribute nonetheless—and a deserved one. And it’s an impressive exhibition of craft besides: Brochu the performer knows how to make a moment pop, and more than one moment does so here.
Express Night Out
How to Calculate Zero: Jim Brochu's 'Zero Hour'
Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
ZERO MOSTEL WAS hailed as the greatest performer on the American stage, but his star has receded since his 1977 death. Fortunately, Jim Brochu is putting Mostel's name in lights again, playing him with ferocious anger as well as with great joy.
Even many who have heard of Mostel may not know he was a painter first. Brochu's Mostel does touch on the star's triumphs — in "Fiddler on the Roof," "The Producers" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" — during a rude, hilarious and touching autobiographical interview, but the interview takes place in a painting studio.
Brochu, looking like an insane Santa Claus, is wildly intense, expressive, manic and comic. He announces he's made 25 Broadway shows, 50 movies and 10,000 paintings. He insists on painting a visiting (unseen) newspaperman and asks whether his guest purchased his coat during a total eclipse. "Art is life," he offers. "Of course you can quote me."
"Zero Hour" is an assault of punch lines, many of which are wonderfully subtle or rely on Brucho's dead-on, over-the-top animation. But the story has emotional heft as well, and is particularly focused on the Hollywood Blacklist and the subsequent suicide of Mostel's friend, fellow blacklist victim Philip Loeb.
"Everyone who's excluded is angry," explains the volcanic Mostel near the play's end. "And then the door opens and I don't really want to go in."
The play, written by Brochu and directed by actress Piper Laurie, premiered three years ago in Los Angeles; it goes to New York after its run at Theater J.
DC Theatre Scene
Zero Hour
Posted By Josh Fixler On September 8, 2009 @ 2:49 pm In Features, Our Reviews | 1 Comment
A solo show is a difficult thing to pull off. It is a monumental task for one person to keep an audience engaged for a whole show, and the line between wonderful and dreadful is razor thin. But in Zero Hour, Jim Brochu proves he is well up to the challenge. He tackles the complex and contradictory life of Zero Mostel with a flourish that is captivating from the moment the lights come up. Brochu, who also wrote the script, brings this mammoth of the theater back to life for one more night of thought provoking entertainment.
Brochu is as dynamic as the hysterical (in both senses of the word) Mostel, the star of Broadway, film, and TV. The play treats us to an opportunity that may never have existed in life: to be present for an evening in Mostel’s private sanctuary, his art studio. Initially, this setting seemed odd. Why set a play about a famous actor in an art studio? But Mostel is quick to explain that his passion was always painting, and that he only acted “to buy more paint”. I am glad that painting is an expensive hobby, or the world might have been deprived of its Tevye, or Pseudolus or Max Bialystock. And so, we enter Mostel’s inner sanctum. There is, in the play, an unseen and unheard newspaper reporter, asking Mostel questions about his life, but this character seems indulgently willing to let Mostel wander from story to story with few interjections. In this way, the play doesn’t feel much like an interview, but more like watching the inner workings of Mostel’s mind. He interrupts himself, sometimes with a witty line, and sometimes because he appears to have forgotten what he is saying..
Brochu’s performance is a symphony of the wiggling eyes and silly facial expressions which made Mostel famous. From the moment the play begins, we are pulled in to a world of the gregarious, the witty, and the raunchy. His Mostel is both self-deprecating and everyone-else-deprecating. There is more than one joke made at a friend’s expense, but you can tell that it is done with the deepest of love (the same may not be said for the comments about the interviewer’s stature and clothing choices). And, the best part is, all of this is hysterically funny. The writing is marvelously witty, with all sorts of Zero-isms that serve as delightful little breaks in the action. At times the show feels like an extended standup routine, and we would expect no less from a man who got his start as a comedian. It is a particular treat to see reenactments of some of Mostel’s old comedy bits (his much admired impression of “a butterfly at rest” is demonstrated with wonderful flourish, as is his spot-on impression of a tea-pot).
This is not to say that the evening is all one-liners. Mostel was quite a troubled man, and his boisterous persona often gives way to brokenness and anger. The portrayal is manic, an art of extremes, and the versatile Brochu goes from shouting to whispers and back again, sometimes in a single sentence. He captures the devastating effect that being black listed had on the actor. Others may have cowered in fear in front of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. But we watch as an offstage voice delivers the questions, and Mostel, alone in the spotlight, stares down his accusers and uses his signature brand of humor, to soften, but not hide, his indignation at being summoned. Brochu shows us the depth of agony that the Hollywood blacklist caused for Mostel and his friends and the profound sense of anger that he felt towards those who named names. In particular, Mostel rants more than once about Jerry Robbins, but even here we are shown the complexity of Mostel, who tells Robbins, to his face, that he is a traitor who will be condemned by their Jewish faith, and yet later describes the art of the Broadway choreographer as “brilliant”. Brochu does not sugarcoat or simplify but shows a man who is simultaneously strong and broken, a contradiction that I think summed up Mostel’s life.
All this moves us to the main theses of the play, about art and compromise, fear and creative expression, which are very occasionally heavy handed but certainly timely. His descriptions of the culture of fear that McCarthy and his committee created seems deeply applicable to us in the post 9-11 world. Mostel decries limitations on freedom of speech and of artistic expression, lessons that our modern society might just need a refresher on. Mostel’s defense of socialism is notably apropos as we hear that word brandished and misused so often in our modern media. This relevance is especially surprising considering that the play was written in 2006, before the “socialism equals evil” equation made its sudden return into our national consciousness and political discourse. I was also particularly moved by the wistful way in which Mostel reflects on America’s greatest socialist venture, Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration and all of the great arts it funded. As an admirer of the greats, Mostel describes with reverence the impact that public funding for creative ventures had on the artistic legacy of the country, and notes how hard that must have been to pull off in such dire times. Zero Hour reaches from the past to give us commentary on the hard times and tough choices that we face today.
A character like Mostel is like a masquerade costume, intriguing on its own, but made enthralling by the person who wears it. Brochu dons this costume and fills it out in a way that keeps us all engaged. It can’t have hurt that Brochu knew his subject in life, and that they were close at one time. When I read this before seeing the show, I was concerned that this might make it make it hard for the playwright to show his subject objectively, but these fears were unfounded. This insider knowledge serves to deepen the portrayal. And so, he is able to bring this exciting character to life on the stage once again. He shows him, not as a flawless caricature, but as a lively, broken, and enigmatic man. It is a night of deep thoughts and deeper belly laughs, and what could be better than that?
Josh writes a blog about inexpensive DC arts and culture: www.districtbeat.com. Check it out.
Zero Hour
Written and performed by Jim Brochu
Directed by Piper Laurie
EDGE DC
Zero Hour
by Rebecca Thomas
EDGE Contributor
Tuesday Sep 8, 2009
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting when I went to go see Zero Hour by Jim Brochu which is playing August 29-September 27 at Theater J. I didn’t know a great deal about the show-only that it was neither a title nor a subject matter that I would usually pick out of a line-up. You’ll thus understand my utter astonishment and delight at discovering Zero Hour to be such a prolific and ground-breaking performance.
There is something refreshing about the simplistic format of the show. The entire performance is a one-man show in which Jim Brochu-the genius who wrote the play-plays the part of Zero Mostel, the self-professed "painter who had an acting habit.’ All of Zero Hour plays out in one place-Mostel’s art studio-and is set towards the end of his life.
The show is primarily a conversation between Mostel and an interviewer from the New York Times-played by the audience-with a few flashback scenes thrown in for good measure in which Mostel is bathed in blue light and recounts various pinnacle events in his life. The result for the audience is a viewing experience that turns out to be an unusual combination of both a fly-on-the-wall perspective and yet also being directly engaged.
Never before have I seen a play which forced me to experience such as full range of emotions. I went from being hysterical with laughter at Mostel’s quips and childhood stories to being engulfed with fury at his recounting of the targeting of primarily Jewish performers by the House Committee for Un-American Activities (HUAC) to being consumed with despair at his telling of the sad fate of his friend Philip Loeb who committed suicide after losing everything from being Blacklisted-all in the course of two hours. At the end of the performance I was left feeling as though I needed to catch my breath, but in a good way.
It is uncommon to find a play that can make you both laugh out loud and struggle to hold back tears with equal intensity. In this-and every respect-Zero Hour delivers.Though the play is riddled with complex and penetrating themes, the most prevalent-or at least the most important as you may have already gathered-is a recounting of the events of the McCarthy Era in which so many were blacklisted and driven to ruin, or worse. Mostel describes the targeting of the Jewish population in the artistic community at length, pointing out the difference between the treatment of actors like Phil Loeb from those like Lucille Ball. As Mostel put it, "It was the most insidious and subtle extermination."
And despite the dire and heart-wrenching nature of the circumstances, Mostel is still able to inject humor into his narrative by capturing their level of absurdity: "Why were they targeting actors? What did they think we were doing? Giving acting secrets to the enemy?!"
Throughout the play it never failed to amaze me just how much of the acting was done with Brochu’s face alone. His endless variety of facial expressions paired with his deeply penetrating gaze completely captivated the audience. Not to diminish Brochu’s excellent use of the stage and constant gesticulating, but I’m convinced that had the entire set been black, with only Brochu’s head visible to the audience, I doubt I would have been any less enthralled. It is the measure of a truly gifted performer to be able to so thoroughly master his own facial expressions as Brochu has clearly learned to do.
For me, one of the most captivating scenes in the play actually had nothing to do with the rest of the story. Pretending to be demonstrating the art of improve to an acting teacher, Brochu transforms into a completely different character-whom Mostel has invented-and demonstrates a full range of emotion from desperation, to giddy (verging on psychotic) delight to desperate hysteria all within a matter of minutes. In this brief scene, Brochu cleverly demonstrate both Mostel’s and his own range and the result left the audience begging for more.
It is uncommon to find a play that can make you both laugh out loud and struggle to hold back tears with equal intensity. In this-and every respect-Zero Hour delivers. Five out of five stars for a rare gem of a play in which a brilliant actor is paired with the role he was born to play!
Rebecca Thomas is both a freelance writer and photographer in the DC area who has had feature articles published in many publications abroad, most notably Switzerland’s Blick Magazine. She has a BA from Cornell University in Anthropology and History. She enjoys fluffy dogs, hazelnut coffee and reviewing theatrical performances for EDGE DC.
WASHINGTON TIMES
THEATER: Sum, substance of Zero MostelHumor born out of bitterness, deep empathy
By Jayne Blanchard
It is no wonder Zero Mostel was a substantial man. No mere ectomorph could contain such a mass of contradictions. He possessed girth and surprising grace. His humor contained lethal truths as well as the shtick of a borscht belt comedian. He craved attention but also isolation. He was a man of integrity who stood up for what he believed in but was pragmatic enough to know when it was time to compromise and get to work.
Actor and writer Jim Brochu has the size — physical and emotional — of Zero Mostel in his funny and piercing one-man show, "Zero Hour," playing at Theater J under the astute direction of actress Piper Laurie.
At one point in the show, Mr. Mostel kvetches that despite a long career in the theater and in comedy, he will be remembered only as "the fat guy in 'The Producers.'" Many may know him from the Mel Brooks cult film, but "Zero Hour" details a career that embraced everything from swanky Manhattan nightclubs (he got his big break at Cafe Society opening for Billie Holiday) to Hollywood (he became great friends with Lucille Ball when they made "Du Barry Was a Lady") and New York theater (he starred in the original productions of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Rhinoceros" and a legendary staging of "Ulysses in Night-town" directed by Burgess Meredith).
"Zero Hour" portrays Mr. Mostel being interviewed in his art studio by an unseen New York Times reporter who tries to separate fact from fanciful fiction and also concentrates on the comedian's laughless years when he was blacklisted in the 1950s following his refusal to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even here there are hilarious moments, including a near-verbatim depiction of his appearance in front of the committee, showing Mr. Mostel as the ultimate canny provocateur.
For all the humor born out of bitterness, there also are equal amounts of bigheartedness and deep empathy, as seen in Mr. Mostel's pain-etched recounting of his friendship with Paul Loeb (of "The Goldbergs" radio and TV fame), who committed suicide after being blacklisted, and the sufferings of friends Ring Lardner Jr., Jack Gilford and Mr. Meredith. "For artists, it was an intellectual Final Solution," he said.
Mr. Brochu captures Mr. Mostel's thundering bravado — the florid language, extravagant gestures, the wagging brows and glowering stare, the way the comedian could never pass up a pun. The low humor is abundant, but so are the high ideals. Mr. Mostel claims to have come from nothing, but "Zero Hour" affirms his worth as both an actor and a man.
***1/2 Stars
WHAT: "Zero Hour," written and performed by Jim Brochu
WASHINGTON POST
Jim Brochu Ably Brings The Hero to 'Zero Hour'
Brochu builds his account around the defining trauma of Mostel's life, his 1955 subpoena to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (By Michael Lamont)
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 4, 2009
Here we are, back at Madame Tussauds's School of Drama. You may recall some of the other recent exhibitions: Valerie Harper at Arena Stage as Tallulah Bankhead ("Looped"), Emily Skinner at Signature Theatre in the guise of Mae West ("Dirty Blonde").
The fascination with celebrity impersonation goes on and on. And actors, being actors, seem to love nothing more than slipping into the skins of other actors. So now, the writer-performer Jim Brochu is moving among us, as the embodiment of the great Broadway clown Zero Mostel, in a polished if predictable solo show at Theater J.
As these impressionist acts go, "Zero Hour" has the virtue of verisimilitude. With his ample frame, expressive eyes and hair forced forward to cover a thinning scalp, Brochu looks spookily like his subject, for whom he's written the piece as a heart-engraved valentine. The vocal inflections, too, are absolutely impeccable. If you close your eyes, you'll swear you hear the Mostel of Brooklyn and Broadway, the late star who forever put a stamp on two of the plum roles of musical comedy's golden age: Tevye the Milkman in "Fiddler on the Roof" and Pseudolus, the conniving Roman slave, in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum."
Brochu's Mostel, perched in set designer Luciana Stecconi's rendering of his New York art studio -- Mostel was an accomplished painter -- reports that to his utter misery, he's destined to be remembered for another performance: as the swindling Max Bialystock, in Mel Brooks's beloved movie "The Producers." (With a straight face, the Mostel of "Zero Hour" informs his invisible interlocutor, a reporter who has come to profile him for the New York Times, that the movie makes him look fat.)
Aping Mostel's impish charm -- those rolling rogue's eyes! -- and replicating his surefire timing, Brochu proves to be a worthy keeper of Mostel's outrageous flame. Yet for all its admirable authenticity, "Zero Hour," directed by actress Piper Laurie, is burdened by the ancient conventions of this biographical genre: the laundry list of family problems, the career retrospective, the résumé bullet points. The show's pretext itself -- the sitting for a celebrity interview -- is artificial, a bit too convenient, especially if you've seen anything of this variety before.
Mind you, Mostel is a meaty subject, as more than one biographer has already discovered. We encounter him late in life, presumably the year of his death, 1977, at the age of 62. (He says he's just filmed a cameo on "The Muppet Show," which occurred that year.) But the dramatic core of "Zero Hour" occurs 20 years earlier. Brochu builds his account around the defining trauma of Mostel's life, his 1955 subpoena to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the enabling instrument of the nefarious blacklist era.
Being on the list made it impossible for him to earn a decent living for about a decade, and as "Zero Hour" posits, it reinforced Mostel's overarching perception of life as a slap in the face. As Brochu declares, after yet another demonstration of Mostel's volcanic nature, "Anyone who's been excluded is angry."
That anger emerges as barely contained sarcasm in Brochu's re-creation of Mostel's appearance before the committee, a panel whose investigations ruined the lives of several of Mostel's friends -- and manifested itself for him as a merciless assault on Jewish intellectuals. Still, Mostel's most venomous feelings are reserved for a fellow Jew: the celebrated stage director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, who did name names, and in Brochu's telling earned Mostel's eternally withering contempt.
That enmity provides the monodrama with a decent payoff. As fate would have it, the careers of Robbins and Mostel would intersect after the hysteria of the '50s died down, when Robbins was brought in to doctor the troubled out-of-town tryout of "Funny Thing." Brochu reenacts a backstage moment in which Harold Prince and George Abbott, the musical's producer and director, gingerly approached Mostel with the news that they want to bring in Robbins.
Mostel takes the high road: "We on the left don't blacklist," he explains, in acceding to the request. But maybe, too, it was an act of self-preservation. No star wants to see his name above the title of a flop.
"Zero Hour," which is scheduled to begin an off-Broadway run in November, may be too formulaic to honor fully the memory of the mold-breaking actor it enshrines. Still, in his meticulously calibrated portrayal, Brochu pays Mostel the next best kind of compliment.
WASHINGTON JEWISH WEEK
All-American actress saddened at never having a Jewish role. Piper Laurie directs 'Zero Hour' at Theater J
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent
As a young Hollywood actress, with her red hair and green eyes, Piper Laurie played the ingenue, the pretty girl, wholesome, all-American. Later she wowed film and television audiences in searing dramas like The Days of Wine and Roses and opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler, for which she was nominated for a best actress Oscar.
In her career's third, but not final, act in 1976, Laurie made a comeback as the off-kilter, religious fanatic mother in the teen horror film Carrie.
And now she's back, directing Zero Hour, Theater J's season opener, a study of imperious actor, sometime funny man and larger-than-life stage presence Zero Mostel. Zero Hour, which is playwright/actor/director Jim Brochu's love letter to the blacklisted Broadway star acclaimed for his poignant Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and bug-eyed Max Bialystock in the original movie The Producers.
Laurie recently admitted that she was both saddened and surprised that in her extensive career she has never been asked to play a Jewish character. Born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit to a Polish-Jewish immigrant father, she, at 5, and her sister were sent to live in the California mountains to ease her sister's asthma.
When the girls' parents finally joined them, Laurie recalls, they affiliated with an Orthodox synagogue. In fact, she and her sister made their stage debuts in the shul social hall.
"The synagogue was a very close part of my life," Laurie says. "I had my first theatrical adventures there, in the backroom entertaining the membership for various occasions -- bond drives, the Red Cross, USO. We once did The Purim Wizard of Oz and my sister played Dorothy. I was a munchkin and gave out hamentashen."
Laurie says she cut her directorial chops as early as elementary school and studied acting seriously enough that she was signed by Universal Studios before she was out of high school. "I did lots of studying and auditioning," Laurie says. "I actually wrote and directed a play in grammar school; I think it was called Willie and was about somebody who was a hoarder. That was during wartime."
At Universal, Laurie picked a new name -- Rosetta Jacobs didn't project a Hollywood aura. "I had a number of names I would use. In those days, the movie stars had names like Lana and Rita," she says. "While I never thought of Rosetta Jacobs as being ethnic -- I thought it was a perfectly fine name -- everyone seemed to think I'd have to change my name."
So for a time she was Ginger something, then Rosetta Cobb. Finally, someone handed her a slip of paper with Piper Laurie and that was it. "It was just part of the whole fantasy of wanting to be an actress; I'd just invent names for myself."
But even though she was a Hollywood success in the 1950s, working opposite Tony Curtis, Donald O'Connor and Ronald Reagan (whom she also briefly dated, but that's another story), the pretty-girl roles didn't feed her desire to do serious dramatic work.
"It wasn't interesting. I made 20-some movies there, and I made a lot of money and I was miserable. I had great expectations and seriously studied acting; I worked with a good acting group on some of the greatest material that has ever been written."
Laurie broke her contract and moved to New York for more challenging work. She soon married a reporter and moved to Woodstock, N.Y. During most of the 1960s and early '70s, Laurie retreated from stage and screen.
"The civil rights movement had begun. The Vietnam War was brewing. I got married. And the whole idea of being an actress in that world just seemed like a waste of time," she says now.
In upstate New York, Laurie devoted time to becoming a superb bread baker, had a daughter and didn't worry about acting at all.
Now she's back for a fourth act, directing Zero Hour, which will move to New York for an off-Broadway run following its stop at Theater J.
Laurie has memories of Mostel: "I didn't know him well, but I used to see him whenever I would go to the Russian Tea Room [in New York]. He would pretend that we'd never been introduced and then just grab me and throw me down on his lap and cover me with kisses," Laurie, 77, says.
Brochu, a Mostel look- and sound-alike, shares more than just physical characteristics with his alter ego. "Zero had, as Jim Brochu has, a very strong personality."
And while onstage he was a gifted comedian, offstage, Laurie says, Mostel lived life seriously. "Zero was, and I've heard this from other people who knew him, far more of an intellectual than a comic in his real life. The play, which takes place near the end of his life, is both very funny and extremely serious because he addresses his role as a Jew in this world."
And Laurie, herself a lifelong, though not public, Jew, respects and admires the conflicts Mostel and others of his era faced as Jews. "I never felt I was discriminated against," she says. "Maybe it was because of my looks, maybe because I was working among a lot of Jewish people, but it makes me very sad that I never had a Jewish part."
WASHINGTON POST
'Zero': A Sum Of Many Parts
By Jonathan Padget
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 28, 2009
When writer and actor Jim Brochu picks up the phone at his home in Los Angeles, he is eager to share some good news.
He has just learned that "Zero Hour," his one-man play about the late, larger-than-life actor Zero Mostel, which opens Saturday at Theater J, has been picked up for an off-Broadway run in the fall.
But there's bad news, too: Brochu has picked up something else -- an annoying cold.
Yet even the misfortune has an upside. "I think I caught the cold from Topol!" he says gleefully.
Brochu explains that he met Chaim Topol after a recent performance of "Fiddler on the Roof," the musical in which Topol has toured extensively in the decades since winning the role of Tevye -- originated by Mostel on Broadway in 1964 -- when the hit show was adapted for the screen.
Given Mostel's choice zingers at his rival's expense in "Zero Hour," in which Brochu portrays Mostel giving a no-holds-barred interview shortly before his death in 1977, the cold could be interpreted as a bit of cosmic justice.
But cold and all, Brochu, 63, is happy to have another slice of life with which to flesh out his connection to Mostel, who survived the McCarthy-era blacklist, achieved Broadway superstardom in 1962's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and "Fiddler," and secured his film legacy alongside Gene Wilder in the 1968 Mel Brooks comedy "The Producers."
It's the blacklist, in fact, that drives much of the conflict in "Zero Hour," more so than Mostel's having been upstaged by Topol. And the conflict comes to a head when Mostel faces the prospect of working in "Forum" under the guidance of famed director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, who, like Mostel, was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s but who, unlike Mostel, named names in hopes of saving his career.
Onstage, Brochu re-creates a portion of Mostel's testimony, emphasizing his indignation at the proceedings but also eliciting laughter and defusing some of the intensity of the situation.
In a larger sense, "his sense of humor saved him," says Brochu, whose lifelong admiration for Mostel deepened with research into the adversity he faced beyond the blacklist, including a harsh reaction from his Jewish parents over his marriage to a Catholic woman and a devastating leg injury he sustained in 1960 when he was struck by a New York City bus.
Brochu tapped his friend Piper Laurie, the Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning actress, to help shape "Zero Hour," which marks her debut as a stage director.
Mostel "wasn't just a clown, he was an intellectual," Laurie, 77, says by phone from Los Angeles.
Brochu "doesn't need very much from a director," she says. "I saw their common personality traits . . . and I know how to encourage things that need encouraging."
Ultimately, Brochu says, "Zero Hour" has done more than merely allow him to inhabit Mostel as a character:
"Sometimes he really inhabits me."