Full Description
The art form of the actor is ephemeral. It’s not like a painting that can be
revisited time and again after its creation. Once the play is over, an actor’s
performance is gone forever. It’s partly why actors are so often insecure.
They need reassurance from their audience, from their peers and from their
family, that their art form actually exists, that they themselves exist. And so
legendary independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom (Sitting Ducks, Can She
Bake a Cherry Pie?, Eating) has created a film, a lasting tribute to actors
and the families who endure them. In this highly dramatic comedy, members
of a theatrical family collide with one another with melodramatic flair. Grisha,
the patriarch of the family and former star of Yiddish theatre, says he’s writing
a book for the public “so they will know we were here.” When one daughter,
the only member of the family to reject a life in show business, brings home
her “civilian” fiancé (Judd Nelson) after a year of estrangement, all hell breaks
loose, complete with major histrionics. What ensues is a day and night fraught
with drama as a family of actors, pitched high with emotion, self-consciously
and with great gusto play the parts in the drama of their own lives.
