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THEATER
Back to the Old Neighborhood
Brooklyn Boy is Donald Margulies's warm yet unsentimental pilgrimage to his outer-borough childhood.
BROOKLYN BOY
BY DONALD MARGULIES. DIRECTED BY DANIEL SULLIVAN. MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB AND SOUTH COAST REPERTORY. BILTMORE THEATRE. THROUGH MARCH 27.
EVER SINCE THE two Homeric wanderers, Odysseus and Agamemnon, came home to their antithetical ends, homecoming has become one of the great, multiform topics of Western literature. Now Donald Margulies offers his take on the motif in Brooklyn Boy, a comedy with serious overtones. Here, though, it is not a matter of returning to a family, wife, or hearth, but to a neighborhood, mind-set, and religion: Brooklyn and Judaism, both of which Eric Weiss has escaped from and has no wish to embrace.
Eric, a novelist, has on his third try written a best-seller, Brooklyn Boy, with a certain resemblance to his own experiences, which some read as autobiography; he considers it fiction, with the milieu and...