Theatre in Review: The Model Apartment (Primary Stages/59E59)

	Kathryn Grody and Mark Blum. Photo: James Leynse.

Donald Margulies has called The Model Apartment his "problem child," meaning that it didn't get much attention in its 1995 debut at Primary Stages. The production was hobbled by the sudden departure of a lead actor, but it's possible that audiences may not have been entirely ready for a play that takes a strange, sideways look at the legacy of the Holocaust. Now 18 years later, Primary Stages is giving The Model Apartment another shot, in a production that is certainly worthy of it. This time, the ball is in the audience's court; can they accept a play that acts like a swift kick to the gut?

For all we know, The Model Apartment will follow this querulous, mildly comic line all evening long. Then, apropos of nothing, Lola casually says, "I wonder what she's doing," a comment that causes a slight, but definite, chill in the air, a tightening of tension that can't be fully explained. Max shrugs it off, and she follows his lead; before long, they are uncorking a bottle of wine, dancing, and preparing to make love.

Thanks to Lola's remark, however, the genie is out of the bottle. The unnamed "she" is their daughter, Deborah, who soon appears, catching her parents in an intimate moment. Deborah is any parent's nightmare: loud, morbidly obese, and seemingly possessed of the mind and manner of a small child. (At one point, Lola, appalled at her daughter's table manners, spoon-feeds her cereal.) Don't be fooled, however; under each of Deborah's remarks percolates pure, undiluted venom, most of it aimed directly at Max. She cannot bear to have him stare directly at her and screams until he stops. She spins bizarre fantasies, all of them loaded with Nazi imagery, such as seducing Dr. Mengele, only to kill him at the moment of sexual climax. Launching into another talking jag, she says, "The last time I visited the concentration camps, they were turned into a bungalow colony," adding that Hugh Downs was the commandant and Bess Myerson played Eva Braun. By this point, Max, in agony, is hiding out in his bed. Deborah crawls right in with him, and in a whisper that could kill, says, "You can't run away from me, Daddy."

Actually, that's just what Max and Lola have tried to do, leaving Deborah behind in Brooklyn while they start over in Florida. But even if Deborah despises her parents, she cannot stand to be without them. Ratcheting up the already sky-high tension level is the appearance of Neil, the simple-minded street dweller whom Deborah has taken as a lover. They instantly repair to the bathroom for a bout of noisy sex, while Max and Lola cringe in the living room. Afterward, trying to make conversation, Neil looks at Lola's arm and says, "Hey, I got one, too," pointing to a tattoo just above his wrist.

And therein lies the canker at the heart of this family's collective pain. Whatever is wrong with Deborah -- my best, nonprofessional, guess is schizophrenia -- The Model Apartment suggests that it is largely the result of growing up with her parents' terrible history as Holocaust survivors. "You made me, Daddy," she snarls, blaming "the brain surgery you did on me," and explaining her overweight by conjuring a terrifying image of herself as containing the entire murdered six million, all of them hungering for food.

Margulies adds more dark details to this family portrait, showing how Max and Lola deal with this situation in sharply different ways. Lola, who can never quite shed her gracious-lady demeanor, tries to beguile Neil with an account of the time she spent in Bergen-Belsen, where she befriended a little girl name Anne Frank. In one of the most remarkable passages in all of Margulies' work, Lola describes how she urged Anne to write another diary, about her time in the camps, in which Lola would be a major character. Lola's matter-of-fact way about the horrors she endured -- not to mention her sorrow at a lost chance for celebrity when the diary was destroyed -- is a mind-boggling account of how the most traumatic experience can be reshaped into a palatable narrative, suitable for sharing with virtual strangers. (Deborah, who has heard this story a hundred times if she has heard it once, begins by heckling Lola and ends by prompting her.) The sequence comes to a devastating close when Neil asks, "Who's Anne Frank?"

But Margulies is here to tell us that the Holocaust doesn't yield uplifting lessons or healing homilies; suffering simply begets more suffering. This is made clear in a series of dream sequences in which Max confronts a thin, beautiful, well-spoken, and utterly respectful Deborah. Only gradually do we realize we are seeing another Deborah altogether, a daughter who, as a little girl, perished with his first wife in the war. The terrible anguish with which the latter-day Deborah asks why she was given a dead girl's name is a revelation; trying to live up to the memory of an idealized lost child has simply driven her mad.

Diane Davis' go-for-broke performance as Deborah is positively nerve-wracking; she keeps us on tenterhooks with her mood swings, her terrible vulnerability, and her equally terrible rage. Just to make the tour-de-force complete, she appears as the other Deborah, a woman who never was, but who exists as the repository of all of Max's broken hopes and dreams. Davis is more than matched by Mark Blum's downtrodden Max, who only wants a moment's respite from this ongoing hell, and Kathryn Grody's Lola, who tries to get through it by pretending that everything is normal. Grody has a quietly stunning moment near the end, when, looking at him as if for the first time, her face hardens with the realization that Max would do anything to get rid of Deborah once and for all. "I can't turn my back," she says with finality; the trouble is, neither of them can.

The rest of Evan Cabnet's production is equally meticulous in probing the characters' unimaginable sorrows. Hubert Point-Du Jour rounds out the cast as Neil, who is equally unsettling, whether he is listening to Lola with an eerie stillness or gleefully damaging the furniture. Helpern's set, which has a full ceiling, is lit by Keith Parham almost entirely using practical units -- table lamps, overhead fluorescent units in the kitchen, etc.; he gets a remarkable number of looks out of them, some of them employing daringly low light levels. Jenny Mannis' fine costumes are highlighted by Max and Lola's Florida-ready casual wear; she also convincingly makes the trim Davis into the rotund Deborah. Josh Schmidt's sound design provides solid reinforcement for his own effects -- cars arriving, police sirens, birdsong -- with his original music.

The Model Apartment is not like anything else in Margulies' work, not even the brutal The Loman Family Picnic. Then again, it's not really like any other contemporary play in my experience. In a series of short, devastating scenes, he provides an unblinking look at how a family can hand down its horrors from one generation to the next. It climaxes in a sorrowful vision of a way of life cut off before it could happen, leaving Max -- and Lola and Deborah -- forever tending a wound that will not heal. Margulies' play is gripping and grueling in equal measure, but even in its most difficult moments, it's a brilliant piece of work. --David Barbour