by dan pine
staff writer
Most playwrights work hard to solve problems with plot and character. For her newest play, Emilie Beck also had to solve for x.
That’s because the Los Angeles-based Jewish playwright piles on the math in “Number of People,” a one-man drama set to make its Bay Area premiere in a staged reading presented by the Peninsula Jewish Community Center on March 11 at the College of San Mateo Theater. The show stars seven-time Emmy winner, Ed Asner.
Asner plays Leo Gold, an aging, Polish-born death camp survivor and retired statistician. Gold is also in the early stages of dementia, which means he has trouble keeping straight the important facts of his life. As Gold haltingly addresses the audience recounting his story, he relies on numbers to maintain some emotional distance from the traumas of being a Jew in the middle of the Holocaust.
Over the course of Beck’s potent one-act play, that numbers game gradually ceases to work.
Leo Gold emerges as so authentic it’s surprising to learn that Beck created him without a real-life counterpart as inspiration. Gold, as they say, bears no resemblance to actual persons living or dead. Beck lost no family members in the Holocaust; neither has she had any relatives suffering from dementia.
“He came about through a confluence of things,” Beck said by phone from her L.A. home. “My father is an actor in Chicago, and I wanted to write something for him. I’m also very interested in how the body can define the personality. We think we are so much in charge of who we are, but if the littlest thing goes wrong, it changes who we are.”
She also was inspired to write after hearing a comment George W. Bush made to reporter Bob Woodward several years ago in response to a question about how history would judge the president. “History?” replied Bush. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
“I really felt I had to respond to that,” she said. “We can’t say we’ll be dead when history judges us.”
An L.A. transplant from her native Chicago, Beck is no Tinseltown wannabe. She is a Northwestern University theater graduate and full-time theater professional. In one of her roles, she serves as associate manager of the Center Theater Group, the company that manages the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theater.
She also has two young children. That busy schedule meant she had to write “Number of People” in stolen moments, mostly during her lunch hour. Busy as she is, she will be in the Bay Area to catch the latest performance of “Number.”
Although one-man shows have been all the theatrical rage in recent years, Beck wanted to make sure her play stood out. “A lot are completely self-referential — they’re all about Me,” she said. “There’s validity to that, but I do get impatient with them. They’re not necessarily dramatic. This is different in that Leo really does involve the audience. The audience has to sit there and figure out who they are.”
“Number of People” has been staged twice before, first at Chicago’s Piven Theater — starring, as intended, her father, Bernie Beck — and another last September at the Pasadena Playhouse, starring Asner.
How’d she snag the popular TV star? A friend of a friend knew Asner and made sure he received a copy of the script. In a classic Hollywood ending, Asner called Beck the next day and agreed to appear in the play.
“One of the great things about having Ed work on this is that he can mine the comedy,” she said. “He is a master. That has been a real joy, to hear the audience laugh, and then gasp, at the moments they should gasp.”
Multi-tasking as always, Beck already has begun sketching out her next play, a work about a woman coping with Parkinson’s disease.
If the past is prologue, then Beck once again expects to see new things in her own work, brought to life through the collaborative process of theater. “I am always going to see something that makes me say, ‘Oh, I wrote that!’” she said, in an upbeat tone.
After a moment, however, she turned more somber, adding, “Or I might say, ‘Oh, I wrote that?’”
The PJCC presents “Number of People” at 5 p.m. Sunday, March 11, at the College of San Mateo Theatre, 1700 W. Hillsdale Blvd., San Mateo. Tickets: $18 for PJCC members, $25 for non-members. Info: (650) 212-7522 or online at www.pjcc.org.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California