There is a wonderfully warm and well-performed production of Visiting Mister Green playing at the North Coast REP through March 11. The play premiered in 1996 with Eli Wallach in the lead. You might have heard of it. I hadn’t. Not a thing. I drove up the coast to Solana Beach without any preconceptions. I was a reviewer with a blank slate, which is odd in this age of literature-to-stage, movie-to-stage, even comic-book-to-stage theatrical productions.
All I had to go on was a press image of an elderly man and an understanding that this was a two person play. Once I arrived at the theatre, however, I learned pretty quickly that Visiting Mister Green has been one of the most produced plays in the world. It has been translated into 22 languages and won many prizes including the KulturPreis Europa and Best Play awards in Greece, Turkey, Israel, Chile and Uruguay. Who knew?
Visiting Mister Green is like Tuesdays with Morrie and pretty much anything Matthew Broderick has done that is set in New York, all rolled into one. You have seen the story before. It is essentially an odd couple flung together out of circumstance, in this case a younger man writhing beneath the tremendous pressure of family expectation and an older man who is set certainly and curmudgeonly into just a couple of belief systems, most notably his Jewish faith.
Mister Green (played deliciously by veteran character actor Robert Grossman) is an elderly, retired dry-cleaner who wanders into New York traffic and is almost hit by a car driven by Ross Gardiner, a 29-year-old corporate executive (a suitably likeable Craig De Lorenzo). The young man is given community service of helping the recent widower once a week for six months. What starts as a relatively contrived comedy about two stock characters who don’t want to be in the same room together becomes a surprising and a surprisingly touching drama as the two men get to know each other, come to care about each other, and open old wounds they’ve been hiding and nursing for years.
The two act play unfolds over the span of the six months, jumping from one week’s visit to another. Each visit opens each character up just a little bit more. By the end of Act 1 we think we know all there is to know about these two guys. But we don’t and the revelation that is made just before intermission came as a refreshing surprise to this reviewer, someone who had no idea what was coming. And I didn’t, not until a few moments before the plot thickened, so to speak which is quite a credit to playwright Jeff Baron. I was expecting a zig to the left, but the story zagged to the right. I enjoyed that experience.
The two actors have great chemistry. Grossman’s Mister Green delivers some wickedly sly (and let’s face it, stereotypical) one-liners and comes close to gobbling the scenery. De Lorenzo’s Gardiner begins awkward and affable but the character gathers in dimension over time. The scenic design, sound, props and lighting aid the two actors mightily, contributing to a believable Upper East Side Manhattan apartment circa 1990. Mister Green’s home was a space I wanted to spend time in, even in its messier, earlier stages. I didn’t tire of the characters, maybe just the endless but necessary knocking at the door.
I couldn’t imagine a story such as this one being told in a larger space. The North Coast REP’s cozy theatre which was packed the night I saw it with a demographic quite different from my own felt nice and tight. It was if we were all on the same page, all learning a few simple but surprising lessons together.
At its heart, Visiting Mister Green is what director Christopher Williams calls “the discovery and identification of the Self and how to survive life’s brutal tragedies. We all need help. Sometimes that help presents itself in the most unexpected ways”. If you’ve seen, read or heard about this play before this won’t be unexpected to you and you will certainly appreciate the clash and easing of two singularly different Selves, one young and one old. I never believe a play where a character develops too much, changes position to much and too quickly. This one almost does that but not quite.
If you don’t know anything about Visiting Mister Green I encourage you to pay him a visit him up at the North Coast REP but don’t Google the play in advance. Part of the pleasure of a story lies in the surprise, something rare in such a heavily pre-promoted, test-marketed age. It’s not a huge surprise mind you, just an every-day part of life that I didn’t see coming.
