SOFT REMEMBRANCE
Soft Remembrance is placed in Depression Chicago, though there’s little of the city in the details beyond allusions to 12th and 14th streets, the Cubs and Sox, and the LaSalle Street Station. It feels older than its setting or even its immediate source, the once-great hit Abie’s Irish Rose. But that crude comedy at least acknowledged the ethnic tensions between its Irish and Jewish families; Soft Remembrance just papers them over. That’s not surprising: this play will do nothing to confront its target audiences with unpleasant facts about social or religious prejudice.
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The play focuses on two curmudgeonly fathers who are ever so cutely brought together through their married children: Sam Green, a Jewish immigrant who owns a paint store on the west side, and Mike Banlon, an Irish immigrant who runs a streetcar on the 12th Street line. Saks emphasizes their kinship by contriving traits that match. They love to frequent the same library, where Sam writes Yiddish poems about the old country; Mike loves to listen to Sam’s poems and accompany them on his violin. Sam hates the cossacks; Mike detests the English. Sam enjoys filling shiny turpentine cans in his store; Mike loves days when no passengers try to hand him expired transfers. Nearly broke and amusingly alcoholic, Mike teaches Sam how to drink the hard stuff (which he gets from his own still) and to converse with his statue of Saint “Tony” (a smarmy scene that manages to patronize and insult both religions); Sam helps Mike redeem his violin from a pawn shop.
Even for a script that panders to audience expectations, the ending is absurd. We were never rooting for the chicken farm; it was just one more arbitrary plot development. Worse, it ignored the play’s real problem–Mike’s destructive boozing, which won’t go away.
Soft Remembrance represents a questionable coupling of Wisdom Bridge, a not-for-profit theater, and Cullen, Henaghan & Platt Productions, Chicago’s biggest commercial producer. It’s no mystery why the latter was drawn to Saks’s concoction; though much weaker than Driving Miss Daisy, Steel Magnolias, or Shirley Valentine, Soft Remembrance is a cozy, feel-good play and, not irrelevantly, a world premiere–something these producers have long been criticized for not encouraging.
