The Legacy

Rural Central Texas, 1962. Dave, still lives in the old family home that his father built. The family is still the only Jewish family in this isolated country town. As his son Nathan faces the (to him) bizarre prospect of becoming Bar Mitzvah, his wife Rachel faces an even greater crisis of faith. As Dave encounters the remoteness of his community, and the even further distance from the faith of his father, his entire family faces the legacy left behind by their immigrant forebears: What do the Jews believe? This is a fictionalized account of the next generation of the family introduced in THE IMMIGRANT, and the second play in Mark Harelik's Texas saga of one Jewish-American family. "The first full production of new play by Mark Harelik is a sequel to his previous successful drama, THE IMMIGRANT. This ongoing story of the Estanitskys, a Jewish family in Texas, slightly resembles, in its second installment, some aspects of Neil Simon's semi-autobiographical saga founded on his own early experiences - and with a precocious and talkative little lad serving as the author's presumed stand-in and mouthpiece as well ... Instead of spotlighting the psyche of some wunderkind, the playwright is probing (but never answering) ultimate posers dealing with life and death, God and man, Jew and Gentile, human suffering and eternal 'Why?' Harelik makes ideas confront each other with Shavian gusto, but he never lets the battle of words stray far from the passions and pain that provokes it ... THE LEGACY is as strong emotionally as it is cogitatively." -George Weinberg-Harter, Drama-Logue