The American Plan
Greenberg ups the ante by setting most of The American Plan in 1960 at a Catskills resort among privileged Jews, haunted by their own contingent sense of existence even when nothing explicit threatens them. The playwright doesn’t seem completely at ease with his Jewish identity, and the script’s tone shifts randomly from Philip Roth to Arthur Miller to J.D. Salinger. But the issue of extermination remains a constant, always threatening to breach the surface. Widowed refugee Eva Adler sometimes approaches the Holocaust tragically (“I loved my husband for so many elegant reasons, and they killed him for such a crude one!”) and sometimes comically (she approves of Simon Says because an arbitrary figure eliminates those who disobey–“a perfect game for Jews!”). But she has no other subject. Eva’s efforts to protect her daughter, Lili, from the world seem less about Lili’s fragility than her own, especially when the world arrives in the form of gorgeous gentile Nick Lockridge, emerging from a swim like a male Venus rising from the waves. When Eva intervenes in Lili and Nick’s budding romance, it seems she’s creating crises rather than preventing them. Or perhaps she just sees danger more clearly than we do. That’s the gravamen of Greenberg’s inquiry: is it paranoia if there’s really a threat?
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More damaging, as in The Dazzle, is Greenberg’s decision to skip many years in the middle of the play, presenting the characters’ development as a fait accompli. This is the playwriting equivalent of “And then I woke up and it was all a dream,” a shortcut that bypasses the hard work of showing each character’s growth–or devolution. Any play whose final scene must include the line “It was all ten years ago” has some bricks missing from the foundation, as does any play in which someone has to say of a principal character, “She’s not charmingly eccentric–she was hospitalized.” Narration belongs in novels, not plays. Yet Greenberg himself creates the need for this observation by having characters who are crazy talk in arch epigrams like refugees from a Coward play.
