A Beer and a Mop
- Jonathan Kalb
- 12 hours ago
- 3 min read
Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir tells the story of a charmingly self-deprecating, openly gay NYU theater student named Josh who is a chronically relapsing drunk. Josh wakes up after a blackout near his home in Denver, doesn’t know how he got there, and is reluctantly taken in by his fed-up, divorced mother. He spends the next year fumbling for recovery and working in a bookstore in a place where he has no friends, and the play’s comic premise is that he hangs out mostly with his grandparents, three of whom have (or will get) Alzheimer’s Disease.
In a series of snappy, quick-moving scenes closer to sketch comedy than plotted drama, Josh’s memory problems are juxtaposed with those of the oldsters, and we’re meant to believe he gains important insights from them to get his life unstuck. It’s a promising setup. The thing is, to make such a story convincing you need to explore the grandparent relationships beyond sketch gags and conceive the grandparents as more than stock types. Brasch isn’t really up for that.
His play has kind of an alcoholic personality in itself—amusing to a point, but you soon learn not to expect too much from it. Its fluid action slips constantly back and forth between realism and non-realistic states like fantasia, dreaming, and projection, reflecting Josh’s preoccupations, and that looseness ultimately feels like avoidance. The plot is as leaky in the end as the famous punch-line skeleton who walks into a bar . . .
The acting and staging, I hasten to add, are mostly very good. Shelley Butler, who staged The Reservoir at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. last year with a different cast, has directed this New York premiere fleetly and efficiently. All four actors of the grandparents—Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, Chip Zien, and Caroline Aaron—are a pleasure to watch. They’re all doughty veterans easily able to give their glib and snappy dialogue the contours of adorably specific humanity.
Even fine old hands like Maloney and Peil, however, can’t keep Josh’s pious Christian grandparents Hank and Irene from being right-wing clichés (he watches football and she sings hymns!). Nor can Zien, a master of hilarious deadpan, keep the absurdly named grandpa Shrimpy from being a horny Jewish cliché.
Heidi Armbruster deserves a medal for making the flimsily written role of Patricia, Josh’s mother, quasi-human. And Noah Galvin is endearing and amiable as Josh, usually. He pulls off being cute and smart, but he loses focus way too often on the specific words the script gives him to establish his personal connections (e.g. “soccer,” “blueberry muffins”).
The one character other than Josh who feels fully human is his brassy Jewish grandma Bev, wonderfully played by Caroline Aaron. Bev is an electrical engineer and former drunk who can’t be hoodwinked or buffaloed, so she’s able to muscle him into recovery. The scenes between these two are the brightest and funniest in the play, largely because of Aaron’s wry ferocity. The night I saw the show, the cast had to hold for a full 20 seconds of laughter after her snap response to Josh’s nervousness about returning to college: “It’s theatre school, how fucking hard can it be?”
Five or six other jokes and gags are very nearly that funny. My favorite is when Shrimpy, having signed up for a second bar mitzvah at age 83, can’t remember his torah portion and, instead of accepting Josh’s help, proceeds to flawlessly recite his first portion from 70 years before! There’s Alzheimer’s for you.
Just so you know, I have no idea what the play’s title, The Reservoir, means, and not because I wasn’t listening. Josh spouts a bunch of new-agey nonsense about it. My guess is, it has something to do with Brasch’s desire to align Josh with moments of miraculous inspiration like Shrimpy’s recitation. If that sort of thing holds water for you, then you’re the right skeleton for this bar.
By Jake Brasch
Directed by Shelley Butler
Atlantic Theater
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