According to Goldman

Post script: Tobias Segal (left) and Bruce McCarty work on a screenplay.

by David Anthony Fox

"Write what you know" is the sound advice offered to almost every beginner. In Bruce Graham’s According to Goldman, it proves an equally effective strategy for an experienced scribe.

Graham is one of Philadelphia's most successful playwrights and screenwriters, as well as a sought-after college teacher. Goldman tells the story of one Gavin Miller, a man who might be Graham's doppelganger. Gavin, once a bigtime Hollywood player, now lives with his wife, Melanie, in comfortable and affluent Northeast suburbia, where he makes a (much smaller) living as a film professor. This second career has its frustrations -- what to make of students whose lists of great films include The Matrix and Legally Blonde? -- but then there's the once-in-a-career pupil who makes it all worthwhile

Meet Jeremiah Collins, an almost pathologically inarticulate boy whose imagination runs wild. Jeremiah's world experience is narrow but fascinating: The son of Christian missionaries, he grew up in Africa. In his film fantasy life, he belongs to the world of Fred Astaire. It's a paradoxical, compelling combination and one that proves irresistible to Gavin, who himself seems to be searching for something to give his life new meaning.

Goldman traces the triangle of Gavin, Melanie and Jeremiah in a fluent, yes, cinematic style. One scene flows seamlessly into another -- evidence of Graham's structural mastery -- and the audience awaits developments with breathless eagerness. The best of the play rings with sharply bittersweet truths, nowhere more so than in the complicated Gavin, who in middle age is both a cynical critic of Hollywood and a man desperate to stay in the game. Graham is famous for his ear for good dialogue, and he doesn't fail us here ("Is that a martini?" asks naive Jeremiah. "No, it's a third martini," replies Gavin.).

Ultimately Goldman doesn't entirely deliver on its promise. Act 2 veers in directions that feel too cliched for the smart likes of Graham and his alter ego. The Hollywood bashing, initially amusing, grows tiresome: It is, after all, a too-easy target. And while Gavin is drawn in rich detail, we never know quite enough about Jeremiah and especially Melanie (the sort of wife who is unfailingly saintly and long-suffering -- surely there's more to her?).

Still, Goldman always entertains and sometimes does more than that, and the play's premiere production at PTC is well directed by Pamela Berlin and classily acted by Bruce McCarty (Gavin), Carmen Roman (Melanie) and Tobias Segal (Jeremiah).

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