Mike Nussbaum first heard of Donald Waldman about a year ago, though he says he feels he’s known him all his life. Waldman is the fictional 78-year-old World War II veteran at the center of Hearts: The Forward Observer, playing at the Northlight Theatre. Nussbaum is the 78-year-old veteran of more than 40 years of theater productions who’s playing Waldman.
“My father didn’t have a lot to say about the war, and back then I didn’t really ask a lot of questions,” says Willy Holtzman. “We lived in Olivette, Missouri, which is outside of Saint Louis, in the typical cookie-cutter kind of house. It was very Jewish. My best friends had fathers who worked in auto parts, scrap metal, furniture–there were a few pawnbrokers. They used to gather in our basement, my father and his friends, to play hearts. They loved playing hearts. They were loud. They’d be laughing uproariously one minute, then screaming at each other the next–probably after someone dropped the queen. And then they’d make up and start laughing again.”
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As Willy grew older, he began to wonder about the mood swings of his father and his friends. “My father was a compulsive eater–he’d eat the way an alcoholic drank, just absorbing it,” he says. “I didn’t know why he acted like he did. At first, I didn’t really care. I grew up in this little development where one house looks like the next, and stupidly I thought that one life is like the next. Then I started thinking about the individuality of each life–not just my dad’s, but the other guys he was playing cards with. I realized I was going to write about it.”
The play won the Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing and was staged in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New Haven. Those productions got glowing reviews, but Holtzman believes that Nussbaum was destined to play Waldman.
Throughout the 50s and 60s, Nussbaum acted in various North Shore community theaters. Then he started getting roles in off-Loop productions. “I finally sold the business in 1970,” he says. “I was too involved in theater–Hull House, Drury Lane, the Candlelight, the Goodman–to do both. I got very lucky partly because of Hull House and partly because of my association with David Mamet. I met him way back when he was a 14-year-old working as a gofer backstage at Hull House.”
And how has his father responded to the play itself? “He’s seen it several times, and I think he likes it,” says Holtzman. “He says I got it right. Well, there’s one exception. I changed the name of the high school he went to. In the play I have him going to Soldan High School, which was his high school’s rival. That drives him crazy. He told me, ‘I went to University High. I didn’t go to Soldan. I hated those motherfuckers.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, dad, but U High sounds kind of preppy.’ I think that’s hard for him to live with, but he’s managing.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph.
