Tillie Edelstein, better known as Gertrude Berg, was one of the most fascinating cultural figures of mid-20th century America. And testament to the power of writing what you know.
She developed a radio series in the late 1920s, based on family life in a Bronx tenement, starring herself as the matriarch, Molly Goldberg, that was credited with cheering up Americans during the Great Depression and integrating Jewish mores into mainstream America.
Replete with its neighborhood call of “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Bloom,” archetypically accompanied by Molly leaning out her window, “The Goldbergs” became a seminal and famously affirmative CBS TV sitcom bringing gentle, multi-generational family humor between 1949 and 1956 and making Berg the first actress ever to win an Emmy. There are books, a prior play on this very subject (“Ordinary Americans”) and a documentary about Berg. There was even a 1970s Broadway version of “The Goldbergs,” starring Kaye Ballard in the title role of the musical “Molly.” Why not? A great case could be made that Berg did as much as anyone to cement the power of a multi-cultural America.
But she had her battles, one of which was with the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is the focus of James Sherman’s new 75-minute play, “The First Lady of Television,” which opened this weekend at the Northlight Theatre with the eminently likable Cindy Gold starring as Gertrude Berg. Berg’s show caught attention from the so-called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, ” a pamphlet published in 1950 by a businessman with ties to the John Birch Society that focused on the Jewish actor Philip Loeb (William Dick), who played Mollie’s husband in the show, alongside Eli Mintz’ perennially opining Uncle David (Mark David Kaplan), Arlene McQuade’s Rosalie (Sarah Coakley Price) and Larry Robinson’s Sammy (Ty Fanning). CBS wanted Berg to fire Loeb; she refused, and in the end, the show was taken off the air.
Sherman’s play, directed and shrewdly cast by BJ Jones and featuring Joe Dempsey as the TV director Walter Hart, imagines the inter-cast conversations about the situation (being known as a communist sympathizer was a career-killer at the time) and the play is an admiring moral fable, really, about a superstar who put doing the right thing ahead of her own self-interest. Obviously, the network battles now come with some contemporary relevance.
The predictable but genial play certainly entertained its Northlight audience on the night I was there, and it features a cast filled with very fine and uniformly warm-centered actors. But it’s an overly brief affair, given the topic, at just 75 minutes, and it never really gets enough of a full head of dramatic steam to do its subject justice.
Any show about a network TV show with real actors has to navigate some intellectual property minefields and I suspect that applied here. And it’s not easy both to remind audiences of this great show (likely enjoyed by their parents or grandparents) through a re-creation and also delve fully into Berg’s high-stakes battles with HUAC, her ever-nervous network and her employees.
You can see the beginnings of that when Gold’s Gertrude has words with Price’s nervous Arlene, and in some of Dick’s feistiness as his character under attack, but most of the speeches and arguments seem to end before the actors have had enough of a chance to amp everything up. And you never really doubt here that the boss is going to do the right thing.
Frankly, I know from prior work that everyone involved here can build stakes far more intensely than this; after all, we are talking about a live soundstage and a major crisis that comes out of nowhere. Perhaps everyone was rather too consumed with cementing Berg’s likability, which was certainly her greatest asset and something the very charming Gold has down cold, but plays (and actors of Gold’s quality) need complex, imperfect characters who wrestle with their demons and their fellow humans. Even heroes usually have their flaws and doubts.
Sherman and Jones, distinguished Chicago artists whose prior theatrical specialty often has been that very thing, should keep going with Berg and the Goldbergs. “Yoo-Hoo” is only the start.
