Howard Katz

This Job type story adds surprisingly little to the age-old story of a man who has it all and then loses everything, hits rock bottom, finds himself alone and discovers a relationship with God. The one, small hint of a new idea in this was that we should be thankful that there even is a rock bottom.

The acting was great. I saw this the first night it played, in previews. The pacing was already strong, possibly a product of well-used rehearsal time. I waited to write about it because I thought the strength of the play would slowly hit me.

When Anna Nicole Smith died this past week, the strength of the play finally did hit me. Or, at least some of its weaknesses did. Anna Nicole gave People magazine readers (uhm, not me at all) a day-by-day drama of someone looking for all that life had to offer, all its riches, in all the wrong places. Somewhere deep inside we were all rooting for her because at some level we thought the things she went after could make us happy if only we had them, instead of her: fame, marriage, extreme wealth (depending on the next rounds of court cases), a house in the Caribbean, etc. And, yet, she always seemed unhappy--and this made us happy because paradoxically most of us are actually able to tame our ambitions by acknowledging deep inside that these things will ultimately not make us happy in the end. Most of us don't have to go all the way down that tragic dead-end road to figure it out. We somehow balance our belief that riches, fame, work, sex and all the rest can give us happiness with an innate sense that they actually will not. It is the Howards and the Anna Nicoles that remind us about the things of this world and the necessity of practice for living a good life.

The comic drama of Howard Katz was not nearly as strong as the drama of Anna Nicole. And, this is why: I didn't believe that he believed that everything he had when times were good would actually make him happy. He had no clue what would make him happy or content, and he was only blindly following the rules of society without any engagement with them. When he lost everything there was little sadness. He hadn't appreciated everything or anything he had when he had it. With Anna Nicole, there was a sense that if she could just have a little more fame or a little more money or less legal battles, then she would finally be happy. With Howard Katz, I thought that he needed to sit down, think for a long time and then map out what he guessed would make him happy. It wasn't that he chose a fork in the road. He was on the wrong path simply by walking around without a map. That the next fork led to great loss was not an absolute consequence of bad decisions, only bad behavior. And, he was too likable a character to deserve bad things for bad behavior.

So, I've finally talked about it. And, I don't recommend. Save your precious money for something richer, something that will embolden you for your path in life.