interview met Nicky Silver in The Forward
Portraying Fat Men in Skirts and other kinds of freaks. (1995)
As a child and well into his adolescence, playwright Nicky Silver was distressingly fat. In fact, when he arrived in Manhattan in the mid-'70s -- to attend New York University at the precocious age of 16 -- he tipped the scales at 220 pounds. He slimmed down fairly quickly, and now, at the age of 34, he's a trim writer of prodigious talents -- and something of a dandy to boot, given to wearing blazers, vests and stylish silk ties.
But the scorn he suffered for being overweight appears to drive him still, if his plays are any indication. One of his earliest works is titled Fat Men in Skirts, a phrase that "seemed to sum up for me what being a freak in the world is like," he told the Forward. "You don't get to be more of an outsider than being a fat transvestite." In Mr. Silver's newest comedy of sexual manners, The Food Chain (which opened last night at the Westside Theatre/Upstairs), there is a grotesquely obese character named Otto who is often shown gorging himself on such treats as Twinkies washed down with several Yoo-Hoos.
The Food Chain, as its title implies, is about people who feed on one another. Otto is passionately in love with Serge, a male runway model. Serge wants nothing to do with Otto, as he's eagerly anticipating the arrival of the beautiful, enigmatic Ford. But it seems that Ford is married to Amanda, who sets the play in motion by calling a crisis hot line and telling Bea, the intake person, her fears about Ford' s apparent desertion of her. The disparate characters are at last brought together by means of an inventively farcical plot.
For all its comedy, the themes of The Food Chain are "kind of grim deep down," Mr. Silver says. "It's about a world where grotesque people have no place. Otto ends up locked out [of the fun], and all the beautiful people are going to be happy. But I think that's pretty much the way the world is."
Mr. Silver says the most accurate representation of the world view expressed by the play comes in a monologue by Amanda. Fat as a child but now as lithe as a ballerina, she warns her fellow characters that if they deviate from the body type considered attractive, "you're a disposable human being. You're a dead bird on the highway."
In its mixture of cosmic absurdities and stark truths, The Food Chain shares traits with Mr. Silver's earlier plays, Fat Men, Pterodactyls and Raised in Captivity. Those works dealt with such distressing topics as cannibalism, incest, adultery, AIDS, murder, guilt and retribution. But Mr. Silver characteristically presented such themes through a heady mix of theatrical genres -- bedroom farce, theater of the absurd, comedy of manners.
The Food Chain differs from its predecessors in at least one significant way -- it has Jewish characters. The chain-smoking, fast-talking Mr. Silver, who was raised in Wynnewood, Pa., explains that he hasn't written about Jews in the last 12 years. "The first play I wrote was called `Bridal Hunt,' " he says. "It was a very mean-spirited little comedy about a young Jewish girl on the eve of her wedding. A reading of it was done at the Phoenix Theatre -- and then the management announced they were going out of business the next day. So I thought I had single- handedly shut down America's oldest non-profit theater.
"But honestly," he adds, "though `Bridal Hunt' was very funny, a lot of people said, `You really can't write Jewish comic characters. People will be offended. You'll be accused of anti-Semitism.' I didn't write another Jewish character until this play. I just made all my characters WASPs."
Mr. Silver says that his decision to write about WASPs was also based on expediency -- he wanted to get his plays produced in New York. Of the plays that have been successful in the last several years, he says, "there's a specific sort about upper-middle-class to upper- class characters. That seemed the market."
Creating WASP characters, he adds, wasn't hard. "Basically, the main difference to me between Jews and WASPs -- in writing them -- was that Jews eat while WASPs drink. And Jews drop their `G's while WASPs do not. So to turn my characters into WASPs, I gave them their `G' s and had them pour Scotch instead of eating all the time."
Despite the fact that his religious education ended after his bar mitzvah, Mr. Silver believes that even his limited Jewish awareness has influenced his work. "It's quite a hideous stereotype, but I think there is a specific Jewish sense of humor," he says. "And in `Food Chain' I didn't even have to disguise it. There's borscht belt humor that's handed down through the genes and it's definitely at work in the play." Bea is the repository for many of Mr. Silver's ideas about Jewish humor. She is the intake person from Jewish hell: asking probing questions with appropriate sensitivity but also dispensing unasked- for advice and criticizing with a skewering wit.
Aside from his Jewishness, Mr. Silver said the other aspect of his personality that feeds his writing is his homosexuality. But in his plays, unlike works written a decade ago, gayness isn't an issue. "In my work, the sexuality of a gay character is never any more important or interesting than the sexuality of a straight character," he says. "It's a given, and I like to think that's progress."
Though he puts a lot of himself into his work, Mr. Silver says that his plays aren't autobiographical in any strict sense. Yet if he could point to a single line in "The Food Chain" that sums up the essence of Nicky Silver -- the small child with a weight problem who grew up to be a spiffy dresser -- he said it would have to be advice given to Otto: "Everyone looks a hundred percent better in vertical stripes."
Ethnic NewsWatch © SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford, CT, Robert Leiter, Portraying Fat Men in Skirts and Other Kinds of Freaks, The Forward, 25/8/1995, pp PG.
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