Playwright Explores Emotional Legacies

When Debbie was growing up, her parents told her bedtime stories. Not the usual kind--these were graphic, shattering memories of the Holocaust. Now her parents are retiring to spend their golden years in Florida. But Debbie, obese and schizophrenic, is on the warpath.

“Debbie is a living, breathing stage creation,” said playwright Donald Margulies, whose dark comedy, “The Model Apartment,” opens today at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. “She’s also a metaphor for dreams and aspirations for the future--and the receptacle of all the parents’ past suffering. Now, in her madness, she’s living the nightmare her parents escaped from. She says, ‘I remember things I never saw,’ meaning the atrocities, the horrors, the hiding out in the woods. It’s been instilled in her, become part of what she is.”

For Margulies, 34, the theme of the legacy of parents--set against the backdrop of Jewish experience--seemed a canvas rich with possibilities.

“After last night’s preview, there was an impromptu discussion,” he said. “One man raised his hand and said, ‘I don’t think this was about the Holocaust. It’s about parents and children.’ Some people concurred. Others talked about post-traumatic stress syndrome and Vietnam vets, children of boat people, children of alcoholics, children whose parents were abused--the whole idea of legacy. I was very pleased that people were not just seeing it as a ‘Jewish play.’ ”

Although Margulies had worried that a Holocaust-themed comedy might be perceived as insensitive (if not sacrilegious), the subject matter was irresistible.

“It’s a personal obsession of mine,” he admitted. “I am not a child of survivors, but my oldest and dearest friend, Stephen, is. I first became aware of the Holocaust when I was about 6 years old and (Adolf) Eichmann was on trial. I also remember seeing images of those rickety men in the camps who were liberated, and being completely terrified when I learned that people had been subjected to that persecution because they were Jews. It instilled a kind of existential crisis in me, even as a child.”

In spite of that pain, Margulies (currently a writer-in-residence at New York’s Jewish Repertory Theatre) understands survivors’ reasons for sharing those experiences with their children. “I think it’s a need to perpetuate (the memory of) those who died, the message of the Holocaust--and perhaps soothe their own guilt. I think it’s always there. Part of what the play tells us is that the Holocaust is omnipresent--because we’re all living in its shadow. But again, this is not a docudrama.”

The comment that most touched him came from a man who said the play had given him his first real understanding of Jewish pain. Does that mean Margulies’ works are “Jewish plays?” That he’s a “Jewish writer?”

“Is Woody Allen a Jewish film director?” he asked rhetorically. “Most of the characters in my plays are Jewish. That’s my choice. It’s my voice. I write about a specific world, and hope that by doing it well, what I portray is universal.

“I tend to write out of things I’m passionate about, things that move me,” he continued. “Often that motivation--and I don’t mean to sound heavy--is sorrow. It is a big sorrow to lose both your parents before you’re 32. It doesn’t mean that I bang my head against the wall and act like Kafka. But certain things make me sad or inquisitive, and I need to explore them.”

The New York-born Margulies studied graphic art at Pratt and launched his writing career creating comedy material for Stiller and Meara. Recently he’s written for the NBC series “Baby Boom.” His in-the-works “Heartbreaker” was commissioned by South Coast Repertory, and his “Loman Family Picnic” (a pastiche combining a childhood memory of a rough spot in his parents’ marriage with “Death of a Salesman”) will premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club later this season.

The playwright doesn’t expect the autobiographical element to disappear anytime soon. His “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” was inspired by a dream he had after his mother’s death, in which she miraculously reappeared at the door, announcing, “I don’t want to talk about it--I just want to jump in the shower.” It ran at the Back Alley in Van Nuys, as did his “Found a Peanut,” which was rife with the pain of childhood.

“These are just things I want to talk about,” he said with a laugh. “Really, I’m not a gloomy gus.”