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Eric Weiss, late-blooming best-selling novelist, claims to be trying out new selves to go with his new life, as if his identity were as easy to pull off as a coat. Book tours, chats on morning TV, meetings about the movie adaptation - all this is heady stuff for a middle-aged secular Jew with a resentful dying father in Brooklyn and a competitive estranged wife in the East Village.
Donald Margulies' "Brooklyn Boy," which Manhattan Theatre Club opened on Broadway last night, is filled with sudden insights and glorious patches of unpredictable eloquence. But even Daniel Sullivan's first-rate production cannot disguise an old yawn of a story in modern dress. The final moment is such a cliche that we leave questioning the authenticity of Eric's entire quest. When we can't believe in the last scene, we forget why we trusted him before intermission.
In many ways, "Brooklyn Boy" is the lesser companion to Margulies' "Sight Unseen," the wrenching 1992 drama that Sullivan revived so brilliantly at this same Biltmore Theatre...