Tuesdays With Morrie. Act II Playhouse, Ambler Pennsylvania, July 2018.
The memoir called Tuesdays With Morrie is famed for its portrait of a real-life inspirational professor, and its stage version provides a marvelous opportunity for the veteran actor Tom Teti as Morrie Schwartz. Teti is giving the performance of his life, and it should not be missed.
Teti is well known in the Philadelphia theater community as an actor, director and teacher, and this is a paramount accomplishment that includes humor, self-deprecation, and sagacity. Also some ballroom dancing ability, and correctly-pronounced Yiddish phrases.
The production has even more to offer, because Morrie’s interviewer in this two-hander is also an interesting character. Sportswriter Mitch Albom was a student of Schwartz’s at Brandeis in the 1970s and returned in 1994 when he heard that his former teacher was dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) to start a series of weekly meetings which led to the memoir. To Albom’s credit, he confesses that he was a self-absorbed, materialistic young man. This disclosure supplies conflict, and keeps the play from soppy sentimentality.
It also presents a challenge to actor Sean Close, who plays Albom, because his character is a flawed, rather blank man who can not express any emotion until the very end. Close acquits himself very well in this difficult task.
As his fatal illness progressed, Schwartz talked with Albom — and appeared on Ted Koppel’s ABC-TV program — communicating the importance of involvement in other people’s lives. He proclaimed his message that living unhappily is just as sad as dying. Among his other valuable aphorisms:
* A leaf becomes most colorful just before it dies.
* The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let love come in.
* Death ends a life, not a relationship.
The play is sad, being about the premature and painful death of a remarkable man. Yet it’s inspiring and uplifting. ALS is incurable and causes atrophy of the body’s muscles, including those that make it possible to breathe. My friend Joel Markowitz died last year only a few months after being diagnosed with it, and he is sorely missed. But Morrie points out that everyone is dying, albeit on different schedules, and what’s important is how we live.
This stage version is co-authored by Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher, the writer of Compleat Female Stage Beauty and many other plays and films. The one-act drama alternates between Albom’s narration and scenes of Morrie and Mitch’s meetings. A television movie in 1999 starred Jack Lemmon as Morrie and Hank Azaria as Albom.
Matt Silva directs this Act II production with sensitivity. During blackouts to denote the passage of time, we can see attendants lifting Teti and moving him to a couch or to a bed, as if the actor actually is crippled by Morrie’s disease. Dirk Durossette’s simple set of Morrie’s living room features a view of the trees in his yard. John Stovicek’s sound design includes effective spatial effects, and snatches of the music that each of the character’s enjoyed. Eileen Cella’s lovely recorded voice sings “The Very Thought of You” which has emotional significance.