Review: A Standard-Issue Bioplay About Joan Rivers in Cape Cod

Given her acknowledged workaholism, the comedian Joan Rivers might never have qualified for Mother of the Year, but clearly, she managed to make her daughter feel loved.

The new play Joan, produced by Melissa Rivers and written by Daniel Goldstein, is now enjoying its third production in 10 months. It debuted at California’s South Coast Rep last November, a production that recently transferred to Barrington Stage in the Berkshires. Now, a new production, directed by Tye Blue and employing a different cast, is running at the Cape Playhouse in Cape Cod.

Melissa Rivers’s intent appears to be part apologia, part hagiography. Unfortunately, it’s less than compelling either way. The territory covered, sketchily, doesn’t add much to the wealth of material that her mother left behind, covered in the candid 2010 documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which Melissa also produced. If anything, the younger Rivers (here portrayed touchingly by Alex Finke) deserves to be anointed Daughter of the Year.

After a bit of cobbled-together stand-up patter (Nicole Parker nails the accent, mostly, if not the body language of Joan herself), Goldstein’s script proceeds chronologically. We flashback to Larchmont, 1953. Having recently upgraded from Brooklyn to the suburbs, Mrs. Molinsky (Parker, switching roles), is pressuring 20-year-old Joan (Finke) to snag a man: “You’re not a magazine cover girl but you’re no meeskite either” (Parker’s would-be Yiddish accent is at once over the top and too precisely enunciated). When not pushing her daughter to pair up and fast, Mrs. Molinsky tussles with her physician husband (Richard Topol, valiant in his many roles) over the purchase of a mink.

Joan’s scene with her first fiancé is gee-whiz generic to a fault — it lacks only a soda fountain (Anton Volovsek’s fast-evolving sets, including talk show stages, are serviceable). The role of Jimmy Sanger (Joan’s initial top prospect) is a good fit for Garrett Poladian, who in his many subsequent guises will be required to overreach his credible age range.

As Joan barrels on, ascending to Johnny Carson then alienating him by embarking on her own short-lived talk show, Melissa is shown mostly standing by, looking on with fondness and empathy, even as her father, the producer Edgar Rosenberg (Topol), gets increasingly sidelined, to tragic effect.

It’s touching that, 38 years after her father’s death and 11 after her mother’s, the real Melissa Rivers is still trying to syncretize what to her no doubt seemed a magical time. For us in the audience, it’s not so fun, no matter how many desiccated vagina jokes Joan tries to put over (at least one too many). We all have our vivid memories of Joan, some fun, some less so. (I remember quailing at a benefit for God’s Love We Deliver – one of Joan’s favorite causes – when she called Anne Frank an “uggo” who was well off dead since “she would never have gotten laid.”)

Joan Rivers had her time–a good half-century–in the spotlight, where she unquestionably broke barriers. She was reliably hilarious a good 99 percent of the time. An inspiration to countless female comics who rode her wake, she left an impressive legacy that neither requires nor warrants this wan reenactment.