Israel Horovitz In-Residence with Jobsite Theater: Sins of the Mother
An enhanced staged reading of the play, written and directed by Horovitz can be seen one night only, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, in the TECO Theatre at the Straz Center. Tickets are $25 or $12.50 for students. jobsitetheater.org.
Massachusetts-born, Obie-winning playwright Israel Horovitz is a big deal in the theater and film worlds. He has written around 70 plays, including The Line, the longest-running play in Manhattan (the Off-Off Broadway production opened in 1974), along with a handful of books and some notable screenplays. A good many of his stories revolve around working-class New Englanders who speak with a thick Nawtheastuhn accent. The choice to set plays like Park Your Car in Harvard Yard in locales of his childhood has lent a relatable appeal to his works. The father of Beastie Boy Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz and film producer Rachel Horovitz (Moneyball, About Schmidt), the playwright develops his characters through his settings, taking a sincere, affectionate interest in the people who inhabit them. “Where are you from?” is one of the first questions Horovitz asks when meeting people.
Far from home this week, the 75-year-old playwright — who doesn't look a day over 60 — has brought to our turf a play from his Gloucester Cycle, Sins of the Mother, a dark dramedy about a working-class immigrant family. He has been working on it with Jobsite Theater since Tuesday.
Actors David M. Jenkins, Shawn Paonessa, Ned Averill-Snell and Jordan Foote will perform a ramped-up staged reading of the play Saturday night at 8 p.m. at the Straz/Patel Conservatory’s Teco Theater. Horovitz hasn’t been didactic in his approach, allowing the actors to develop their characters with just a few nudges. Before he arrived in Tampa, he sent the cast a link to a video about families who live in the Italian neighborhood of Gloucester and has spent time discussing story and character.
“With our short time frame, he could have said, ‘Just do it this way,’” Jobsite Artistic Director Jenkins said of Horovitz’s rehearsals. “But he isn’t like that. He’s been very unassuming and personable.” Not at all self-important or too attached to his words, Horovitz even decided to alter a few pages of the play for the Tampa performance.
Horovitz says his knack for geographic authenticity didn’t always come easily. One 20th-century playwright — a staple in the American high school curriculum — helped drive the point home, so to speak.
“When I got through the Ph.D program at the City University of New York, I was very close with Thornton Wilder at the end of his life,” shared Horovitz about the legendary writer of Our Town during a recent phone interview with CL. “I was right out of grad school and had written a trilogy that was full of literary allusion and very dense [The Wakefield Plays, named for Horovitz’s birthplace]. “Wilder said, ‘There really isn’t very much Wakefield in those plays.’ He started to talk about idiosyncratic language and a real sense of place. One thing just really hit me hard: He said you don’t have to write about the world. If you write about one little place, and really get it right, it will work for the world. … My real talent became who I was and where I come from.”
A Tampa Bay friend referred Horovitz to the award-winning Jobsite company — “I think you’ll like these people and they’ll like you,” the pal (whom Horovitz chooses to keep anonymous) assured him.
As attached as Horovitz is to his home state, he doesn’t stay put. The resident of Beacon Hill in East Gloucester also resides in Paris, New York and winters in Florida a couple of months out of the year. He works frequently in Scotland and with a theater company in Spoleto, Italy, that produces his works exclusively.
“I started to develop relationships with theaters down here and it’s been great,” the writer/director said of Florida. Most recently, he’s worked with Palm Beach Dramaworks on My Old Lady, starring Estelle Parsons. He adapted the play into a film that was released last fall at the Toronto Film Festival. It stars Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith and Kristen Scott-Thomas.
Horovitz added that though his early experiences in Florida theater in the 1990s were lackluster, he has noticed a surge in quality of theater in South Florida and enjoys visiting friends in the Tampa Bay area, walking or cycling the trail in Fort De Soto (his favorite) or golfing at Babe Zaharias public golf course in Tampa. The impressively athletic Horovitz married a former Olympic marathon runner, Gillian Adams Horovitz, and has been a runner himself since he was 13. Lately, though, he's had to stick to low-impact cardio because of a worsening knee injury incurred while playing football in high school.
“I love meeting new people from different places, and I love seeing the way people live,” Horovitz said. “I’m not much good at hotels or museums. I hate cathedrals.”
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2015.