Jews and Christians, Muslims and Catholics, no matter what religious designation you belong to, we all have two things in common. First, we all have parents who are crazy — let’s just get that out of the way. Yes, there are varying levels of madness, but ultimately they’re just not as sane as we are, right? And second, we’ve all had to wait in an airport terminal for an inordinate amount of time for one reason or another. With that, we have the basic premise for the play “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m Home for the Holidays.”
The follow-up to the three-time award-winning play “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy,” the play features a main character forced to reconcile his family members’ cultural differences. We’ve all had to do that at one point or another, right?
Peter Fogel has. If his face or name seem familiar, it’s because he’s done quite a lot of work on both the small and big screen. He’s appeared in “Married with Children,” “Men Behaving Badly” and other shows on HBO, MTV, A&T and NBC. He’s also the star of this play, but more specifically, he’s the only person who appears onstage, since this is a one-man production. Does he understand how families can be a bit looney? Of course he does. “Yeah, they’re in denial, complete denial,” he states, then clears his throat. “They think, ‘It’s you, it’s not me,’ and that drives them crazy.”
Back to the play. The original production was created by Steve Solomon based on his own experiences with family. In the new play, Fogel takes over Solomon’s role as the main character, who has found himself stuck in the Atlanta airport while trying to get home for the holidays, and ends up dealing with his family via cellphone. It seems like it would be a lot of heavy lifting for one man to do, but Fogel has a few tricks. “It’s like a large therapy session where the audience is my shrink. And I’m just venting to them for the hour and a half and I’m bringing my life to the stage. I’m going from myself to different characters.”
This means that even though Fogel plays the main character role, he also acts out each of the family members as they talk to him. He explains, “I’m basically becoming these characters right onstage for the audience,” which leads to some pretty interesting results.
Fogel had some big and very successful shoes to fill. Fortunately, Solomon was the one who cast Fogel, and he knew what he was looking for. “What makes the show unique is that I’m doing different characters and voices, and you have to have a good ear,” Fogel says. “So, anything Steve wanted me to do I just matched it.” Solomon liked what he heard, and the rest was history.
The story of the play is closely matched by Fogel’s own experiences with his family. For example, at one point the main character’s family asks him to pick up a cake for the event. But he’s in Atlanta, not at his destination — and he’s the one who’s supposed to get the cake? “I’ll just use my own experience, because I know my family, going, ‘Why are they asking me to do it? I’m coming from out of state, why do I have to pick up the cake?’ And I say, ‘I’m gonna call my brother-in-law, let that yutz pick it up.’”
When Fogel isn’t onstage, he’s splitting his time between finding new acting gigs and working in the business world. “I straddle both worlds: the business and the theatrical. And of course my father was disappointed that I did this, but I turned out to be the most successful one in my family anyway,” he says, then laughs. “I have failed doctors in my family that ask my father for money. But the active comedian, very independent, did his own thing, did lots of television, earned a living, never asked for a handout. Put that down.”
Don’t think you have to fit into the unique situation of having a Jewish and Italian family to enjoy the play, because that’s not its point. “The whole focus of the show is family is still family, whether it’s Italian, Jewish, Armenian, Romanian, Transylvanian,” Fogel explains. “We’ve had Italians come, Jewish people — I’ve had African-Americans come up to me, shaking my hand, and go, ‘This is just like my family!’”
