The Model Apartment

Comedy may be tragedy plus time, but sometimes a tragedy is so immense that it can only devolve into savage farce. Donald Margulies' The Model Apartment, currently playing at Traveling Jewish Theatre, considers the limits of comedy by focusing on a pair of Holocaust survivors in their golden years. Lola (Naomi Newman) and Max (Jarion Monroe) are retirees making the twilight move from Brooklyn to Florida. But their new condo isn't ready, so they relocate temporarily to a model apartment in which everything is a shining, useless surface — the cigarette tray is glued to the coffee table, and the refrigerator is an unplugged prop. As they settle down to sleep, they're confronted by their Nazi-obsessed daughter, Debbie, played here in an aggressively comic and frankly stunning performance by Amy Resnick. For the rest of the night, Lola and Max find themselves dwelling on past horrors, all the while surrounded by the more banal horrors of the present. This production, smartly directed by Amy Glazer, works best whenever Debbie is onstage to dredge up her mother's unreliable memories from the concentration camp — long-buried traumas that emerge amid the oppressive Miami pastels of Lisa Clark's pitch-perfect set. The result is a disorienting, inconclusive fever dream designed to mock the notion that time heals all wounds.