Selected Reading
Nicky Silver
Born in 1960 in Philadelphia, Nicky Silver
is one of the best-known and most successful Jewish playwrights of the American
boulevard-theatre. His hilarious plays range between social satires and absurdist
comedies, which always revolve around the failure of family- relationships.
His award winning off-Broadway hit The Food Chain features an anorexic hobby
poet along with a heavily overweight homosexual lovesick stalker homeboy and
his jewish mother who offers "phone kvetch" on a crisis hotline
and drives her callers into suicide and an absurdly good looking, vain underwear
model.
Talking about his play´s emotionally crippled characters, Silver says:
“It's like there are two happy people in every high school – the
head cheerleader and the football quarterback, and the rest of us just sit
on the sidelines picking our noses and eating.” The Food Chain is Silver´s
revenge on a society obsessed with physical beauty: "Oh, I was fat as
a kid. When I went shopping for my Bar Mitzvah suit - a brown suit, no natural
fiber - I was a kid with a 42-inch waist."
The question the play poses is “who is at the top (or rather at the
very bottom) of the emotional food chain? Silver uses Yiddishisms freely throughout
the comedy. "My great-grandparents - who lived to be 106 and 109, by
the way - spoke it, and that's where I picked it up. And since this was my
first play where I have such Jewish characters, that's why I use the Yiddish."
After friends and family warned Silver not to joke about Jewish issues because
people would be offended, he didn´t write Jewish characters until The
Food Chain. “I just made all my characters WASPs." Creating WASP
characters, he adds, wasn't hard. "Basically, the main difference to
me between Jews and WASPs -- in writing them -- was that Jews eat while WASPs
drink.”
My My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine opened at the Sledgehammer Theater in San
Diego. Playwright Nicky Silver agreed to change the title in midrun after
Borgnine's attorneys threatened legal action. Silver decided not to change
the title to My Marriage to a Has-Been Grotesque-Looking Old Fat Guy With
No Sense of Humor or Perspective, opting instead for My Marriage to Marisa
Tomei. Tomei did not sue.
Links:
• http://www.bway.net/~dylanny/
• http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/kerkhoff/ContempDrama/SilverNicky.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Home