By Cynthia Citron

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Zero Mostel, by his own definition, was a “heap of contradictions.”  He was also, according to Jim Brochu, angry, perverse, rude, insulting, and hilarious.

 

Jim Brochu should know.  He has played two of Mostel’s most famous roles: Pseudolus in “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum” and Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof”, and now the award-winning actor/playwright is starring in “Zero Hour”, a one-man show about the comedian whom Life magazine once called “just about the funniest American now living.”

 

Brochu, who onstage looks amazingly like Mostel, invests the role with a blazing passion and a palpable anger.  Almost too much anger, as he shouts and roars his way through the ups and downs of Mostel’s dramatic life.  Rendered in Brochu’s boisterous monotone, the relentless pitch often verges on cacophony.

 

The premise of Brochu’s play is an interview that Mostel has granted to a reporter from The New York Times.  “This is an interview,” he says.  “It isn’t a relationship.”  And though he is ostensibly talking to the reporter, he winds up asking and answering questions that he poses to himself.  “My life is an open zipper,” he says, and when he receives what he considers an inadequate response from the reporter he accuses him of having had “a humor bypass.”  

Mostel was born in 1915 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn. And even though he claimed to be “not religious,"  he took his cultural heritage very seriously throughout his life.  He also took his painting seriously.  From his earliest years he considered himself an artist rather than a performer and, in fact, “Zero Hour” is set in his studio/hideaway on West 28th Street in Manhattan.

His first brief marriage having failed, (“she had the sense of humor of a grapefruit,” he said of his wife), he married Kathryn (Kate) Harkin, “a dysfunctional Catholic Rockette,” in 1944.  Whereupon his parents declared him dead, “covered all the mirrors and sat shiva for a week.”

Mostel’s career (and his salary) peaked in the 1940s, but it came to a dead halt in the 1950s when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to participate in Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunt.  “That was no committee,” he said, “it was an inquisition.”  To him it was an attack on the Jews.  “They wanted the artists, the creative people,” he said.  “To them, Communists equaled liberals equaled Jews.  It was an intellectual ‘final solution’.”

Blacklisted for refusing to cooperate, he did not work again for a decade.  “It was 10 years in limbo,” he said.

Then, in 1960, Broadway producer David Merrick invited him to appear in a play called “The Good Soup”.  While the play was still in rehearsal, Mostel was hit by a bus and his left leg was crushed.  (Brochu’s rendering of the accident and its aftermath is one of the more affecting and horrifying moments of the play).  After many months in the hospital—and some 15 operations—Mostel was able to keep his leg from being amputated, but it continued to give him pain for the rest of his life.  Meanwhile, “The Good Soup”, with Jules Munshin taking Mostel’s part, closed after 21 performances. 

But the best was yet to come: Ionescu’s “Rhinoceros”, “Forum”, and “Fiddler”, for each of which he won a Tony.  His interpretation of Tevye in “Fiddler” was so original, in fact, that it has been followed by every actor who has played the role since.  And finally, 10 years after his blacklisting, his vindication was complete: he was invited to a reception at the White House by President Lyndon Johnson

He never lost his anger, though.  “Anybody who has been excluded is angry,” he explains, “and I have been excluded as a man, as an entertainer, and as a Jew.”  Ironically, he died of a heart attack after only one performance as the angriest Jew of them all, Shylock, in a play called “The Merchant.”  This play by Arnold Wesker recast Shakespeare’s villain in a pro-Jewish light and Mostel had hoped that the role would be the crowning achievement of his career.

For actor and playwright Jim Brochu, however, “Zero Hour” has to be one of the greatest achievements of his very extensive career.  While on the traditional scale it may not quite be a 10, it’s certainly not a 0.  I’d give it an 8 1/2

“Zero Hour” is directed by Paul Kreppel and is a production of the West Coast Jewish Theatre. It will run weekends through August 13th at the Egyptian Arena Theater, 1625 N. Las Palmas Avenue in Hollywood.