Mentions/Awards/Kudos:
2006 Kevin Kline Award
Best Supporting Actress - Lavonne Byers
Photos by John Armstrong
Critics' Reviews
Jim Campbell - Playback STL
Plays based on ethnic jokes are risky; you never can tell how sensitive an audience will be on any given night. So when I entered the ArtLoft Theatre for HotCity Theatre’s second season opener, David Ives’ Polish Joke, I was careful to note the crowd’s reaction. In an age when political correctness runs rampant, I was interested to see if a St. Louis audience could build a bridge and get over themselves by enjoying a play full of tongue-in-cheek, off-color humor.
In Polish Joke, the jokes come fast and furious as young Jasiu (Christopher Hickey) is forced to reconcile with his Polish heritage. His uncle Roman (Greg Johnston) recommends to a very young and impressionable Jasiu that he change his last name and deny his family line if he wants to get anywhere in the world. Taking his mentor’s advice to heart, Jasiu spends a large part of his life dealing with the repercussions of denying his Polish upbringing.
The play’s lighthearted look at a man dealing with self-acceptance is a wild roller coaster ride made up of several small scenes illustrating Jasiu’s path to absolution. The smaller scenes work extremely well, giving the production a sense of fun and frivolity. Add in the fact that 24 characters were played on stage by five actors not only impressed this jaded reviewer, it made me sit up and appreciate the hard work of these fantastic thespians.
Hickey was sensational in the lead role of Jasiu. His ability to play the straight man in a play peppered with hilarious one-liners and well-thought-out comedic scenes was terrific. No matter what scene he was in, he commanded the stage like a veteran actor. Making his Hot City Theatre debut with this production, Hickey has proved that he is a talent to watch by giving a very well balanced performance.
Giving Hickey a run for his money were B. Weller and Lavonne Byers. Director William Grivna pulled a comedic ace out of his sleeve by casting Weller in most of the roles with the best punch lines. I have been a fan of Weller ever since I saw him perform with the local sketch comedy troupe, the NonProphets. Weller is one of those rare comedians who can mix his physical and verbal humor together seamlessly without coming off trite. Shining in his roles as Polish immigrant Ladislaw, Irish travel agent Mr. O’Flanagan, and as a psychotic doctor, Weller was able to garner the majority of the audience’s laughs.
Byers also impressed me with her amazing comedic performance. Some of her scene-stealing roles, including playing a florist, a dopey nurse, and—the crowd favorite—Mrs. O’Flanagan, nearly brought the house down. Her easy interaction with Weller and Hickey completed a comedic trifecta that proved that when great actors work together, good things happen.
I would be remiss in not mentioning the other two actors who help round out the cast. Both Greg Johnston and Larissa Forsythe turned in respectable, enjoyable performances and gave the production a healthy dose of stability.
What could have been an awkward night at the theater turned out to be a night where we could unabashedly sit back and laugh. While the Polish jokes on stage may have been a bit corny and dated, one thing is certain: This production is no joke; it’s a smash hit.
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A Polish guy walks into a theater...
by Bob Wilcox - West End Word
Who knew that someone named David Ives is Polish?
Playwright Ives wrote the delightful short sketches grouped together under the title All in the Timing, stuffed full of hilarious word play, sly literary references and sharp cultural observations; and another group of brief comic observations called The Lives of the Saints.
Now Ives has outed his ethnicity in a play called Polish Joke.
Questions of identity have permeated modern literature, art and theater — and philosophy, religion, politics, psychology and just about anything else you can name. Ives takes identity head on in its most simplistic form, ethnic stereotypes. And he’s an equal opportunity offender — Polish, WASP, Irish and Jewish suffer every cliché about ethnic groups that he can squeeze into the two hours of a play.
As with his other plays, Ives entertains us with a baker’s dozen of short scenes. But this time, instead of being discrete, the scenes hang together as they follow the life of one young man.
We meet Jasiu as a boy sitting at the feet of his Uncle Roman in the uncle’s driveway on a Saturday afternoon in a Polish neighborhood. The uncle is explaining to the boy what it means to be Polish — why he drinks egg and salt in his beer, why Polish jokes are funny (they’re true), and other essential points of the heritage that defines his identity. Frequent feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness, of the suspicion that everything eventually goes bad, are part of that heritage. It’s the melancholy that lurks behind and occasionally seeps through all the greatest comedy.
In the current production of Polish Joke at HotCity Theatre, Christopher Hickey does a lovely job at each stage of Jasiu’s life, making fully realized transitions from child to adolescent to adult.
Hickey is the only actor in the production who plays just one character. The other four performers portray a variety of people in Jasiu’s life. Most of them are shallow stereotypes, even broad caricatures. But the actors’ transitions from one to another are just as complete as Hickey’s transitions within his one character.
Greg Johnston starts as Uncle Roman, very clear and funny in his explanations of things Polish, though a little too rushed the evening I was there to extract the full measure of the comedy (it’s all in the timing). But Johnston is brilliant as the sympathetic priest in the seminary that the adolescent Jasiu attends, and where the young man faces an identity crisis when he loses his vocation for the priesthood.
Jasiu tries a new identity, changing his name (as his creator Ives had done) to something blandly WASPish. But his first job interview sees right through the name and his brilliant academic record to the Polish core. Larissa Forsyth, who had already delighted as the little neighbor with whom Jasiu played doctor, now is the brittle, condescending interviewer, flying the colors of her Mayflower heritage. Forsyth, who brings total conviction and perfect pitch for style to every role she plays, also becomes Jasiu’s Jewish fiancee. Rachel is not a stereotype but a deeply sympathetic character. Her ethnicity takes its licks from Johnston as Rachel’s father and, especially, Lavonne Byers as her mother. Byers gets major help from the costume provided by Laura Hanson, whose creations multiply the fun throughout the evening.
After Jasiu encounters a family of Polish emigres who have tunneled from Poland to New York — Byers again as the woebegone wife, B. Weller as the eager husband — he decides that the only way to step up a rung on the ethnic ladder is to move to Ireland. This occasions a broadly comic scene in an Irish travel agency, with Forsyth as a dewy-eyed Irish maiden, Byers as a whisky-swigging and potato-eating Irish matron, and Weller as the pumped-up head of the agency. Some of Weller’s habits as an actor limit him in this role, but they work well for him when he and Byers later do a doctor-and-nurse routine right out of vaudeville.
Accompanied by Christopher Mannelli’s witty sound design that travels from polkas to Bartok and beyond, the fine cast at HotCity, under William Grivna’s sharp direction, keep the laughs coming as meteorological mishaps lead Jasiu back to his true identity and a sweet ending. In Polish Joke, Ives gives us the pleasures we expect from his word play and his pictures of human folly, with the added satisfaction of his thoughtful, semi-autobiographical exploration of the quest for one’s true self.
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By Richard Green - Talkin' Broadway
Polish JokeWhen Monty Python's Spamalot opened on Broadway, theatrical producers were amazed at that show's ability to draw a highly elusive ticket-buyer to the theatre: the middle-aged male. Clearly that same Baby Boomer, following King Arthur and his Laker Girls, needs to hear about David Ives.
With an instinct for wordplay that rivals Tom Stoppard (back when he was funny) and a great gift for goofiness, Mr. Ives shows all the potential needed to keep that same cohort in the theater for the foreseeable future. His brain teasing black-outs, lumped together in the revues Variations and All In The Timing, are worthy successors to everything that's loved about John Cleese, Eric Idle, et al. And, Mr. Ives can even write for women which, perhaps, puts him a notch above the Pythons.
Polish Joke is a paean to Ives' boyhood neighborhood in Chicago. And though it's a full-length play about an absurd struggle to rise above absurdity, it's still lighter-than-air. Under what must have been the intensely loving, supportive direction of William Grivna, it's enjoying a terrific local premiere, with just enough talk about beer and breasts to justify dragging your husband along.
Christopher Hickey is Jasiu, or John Sadler if you prefer (and nine out of ten HR people evidently do prefer that blander name), the wide-eyed boy with the modern version of the Identity Crisis. In his case, the crisis is that he actually has an identity, in an America where a sense of self-importance comes from worldly success. The fact that it's a Polish identity that must be paved over just makes this show a lot more fun than it might be otherwise.
Mr. Hickey is almost painfully bright eyed and kindhearted, thanks to the sense of place and Polishness that keeps and comforts him. His childhood ends after his godfather (Greg Johnston, with a keen grasp of an older man's pleasant futility) explains how Jasiu can never escape his identity. After that, Mr. Hickey's self-esteem becomes a house of cards in a very windy city.
The most delicious and delirious moments are courtesy of Larissa Forsythe and Lavonne Byers in a surprisingly well-drawn series of cameos of the women in Jasiu's life. Ms. Forsythe as an extravagantly WASP-ish executive, a childhood crush, and a devoted girlfriend; Ms. Byers is a fantastically retro Polish airline official, a potato-eating Irish woman and on and on, in their many incarnations. I would never have thought the brainy Ms. Byers capable of playing a hilariously vacuous blonde bimbo, but she does even that beautifully. At curtain call, I really did shake myself momentarily when I counted only Ms. Forsythe and Ms. Byers among the actresses in the quick final bows.
Elsewhere, Mr. Johnston is excellent as a world-weary priest and as the older, dying Uncle Roman at the end. Actor B. Weller does very well as many of the others: a Pole who tunnels his way to America, a half-Polish doctor (thank God Mr. Weller has finally found a way to use his Charlton Heston impression on stage), and a wickedly wacky travel agent in a scene that almost seems like a full-length play itself. Mr. Weller also did well in All In The Timing recently, so it comes as no surprise that he's right at home in Polish Joke. How many self-effacing, slightly off-center actors are there who (as Trotsky, in Timing) could so sincerely fume over international politics with a hatchet buried in their forehead?
It's probably rude and ridiculous to paint a silly show like this with a great Social Meaning when it repels that kind of stain like Scotchguard (or its Irish equivalent). Polish Joke seems to dance away in a little jig (or a subversive polka) every time I get it under the microscope. But we do learn that the mythology of Poland is as rich as any nation's (and a good deal funnier) and their ironic pride is oddly calming. Beyond Mr. Hickey's beautiful, light-hearted torment, this semi-demi-memory-play lingers in our minds with a clever feel for why Americans bother to re-invent themselves, and how a loving fate still manages to unmask us, now and then.