THE STORY: “Are you ready?” Jerry confronts this question from the womb of his favorite restaurant booth while the months pass by and the son he and his wife, Pauline, are expecting grows from the size of a peach to the size of…a baby. As the due date approaches, can friends and family members help Jerry feel prepared, or just feel worse, like some un-anonymous sperm donor terrified of making the transition from being the son of a father to being the father of a son? Jonathan Marc Sherman’s exploration of impending parenthood is sharp, funny, and deeply felt.
“You’d think a play consisting almost entirely of two-person conversations in the same restaurant booth would quickly become tedious. Yet in KNICKERBOCKER, playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman [manages] to make this potentially static setup alive with biting humor and keen observation…the talk is rich with quirky details and deep insights.” —Backstage.
“KNICKERBOCKER is uninterested in treating its subject matter with either frat-boy levity or weepy sentimentality; that’s the Hollywood approach. Instead, Sherman, seemingly aware that what is happening to Jerry is both momentous and a little bit banal, approaches the topic sideways…each [encounter] is filled with little epiphanies that, cumulatively, have the effect of making you see the world through Jerry’s newly awestruck eyes…a surprisingly moving portrait of an everyday sort of fellow standing on the brink of one of life’s great adventures.” —Lighting and Sound America.
