THE SUBSTANCE OF ROB MORROW
Actor Rob Morrow has come full circle. The Emmy-nominated Northern Exposure star, recognized for other notable TV shows (Billions, Numb3rs, The People vs. OJ Simpson) and films like Albert Brooks’ Mother, Quiz Show and Maze, returns to his stage roots in Jon Robin Baitz‘s The Substance of Fire at The Ruskin Group Theatre through September 1, 2024.
Morrow portrays Holocaust survivor Isaac Geldhart, head of a sinking publishing house that specializes in serious, but no longer very saleable books. But in 1989, in the play’s world premiere at New York’s Naked Angels company, he portrayed Isaac’s son, Aaron, who’s leading the charge to take the company out of Isaac’s hands.
With his strong pedigree as a stage actor, this production marks a homecoming for Morrow. He considers The Ruskin Group his fourth artistic home. “I went to high school with John (Ruskin), and we rekindled our relationship years ago. When I saw they were casting Death of a Salesman, I ended up playing Willy Loman in 2019.” He also teaches master classes at Ruskin.
Rob Morrow and Robert Adamson in Ruskin Group Theatre's Death of a Salesman (Ed Krieger)
He worked out his acting chops at such legendary companies as New York Stage and Film, where Hamilton — then still called Hamilton Mixtape — was workshopped; Ensemble Studio Theatre, where Steve Martin, Christopher Durang and John Patrick Shanley debuted as playwrights; and Naked Angels, where Morrow performed readings, workshops and staged productions of plays by Baitz.
Referring to the playwright as Robbie, Morrow told me in a phone interview for Stage and Cinema that the two were best friends for years. “It’s funny, I’m writing a memoir and I have so many great stories with Robbie, but I have to cut so much out. This play was a really important moment in my career, and to be able to look from a different perspective (as Isaac), it resonates almost more now than when we first did it, with a relevancy that feels even more connected to the zeitgeist today.”
Rob Morrow as Isaac and and Emmitt Butler as Aaron in Substance of Fire.
The play centers around the father, Isaac, whose company is going under, and wants to publish an expensive 6-volume set of books about Nazi medical experiments. Perceived as an unloving, critical father, his adult children own shares in the privately-held company, and son Aaron handles its finances. Aaron is gay but closeted, and has brought Isaac a manuscript by a former lover that he wants him to publish. It would likely be a best-seller and could help rescue the company. But Isaac would never consider it.
Isaac says, “This ain’t literature. It’s a dress. You don’t read this book. You get a nice little, strung-out, anorexic model who doesn’t need a lot of covering and you put it on her to wear to a gallery opening.”
Emmitt Butler, Barret T. Lewis, Fiona Dorn, and Rob Morrow in The Substance of Fire
While Isaac survived the Holocaust, he was never in the camps. But his entire family was eliminated. He spent the war sheltered in a basement, eating “smoked eel and reading Stendhal and Dumas.” When he emerged, he saw a “wrecked world” and came to America to reinvent himself and preserve the lost culture. He holds impossibly high standards, literary and otherwise, but the question of relevance is key.
In reviewing the original production, Frank Rich wrote in the The New York Times, “Is Isaac’s proud insistence on holding onto his past the choice that allowed him to survive, or is it a burden that robbed him of any hope for happiness?”
Both, says Morrow.
“There’s this conflict between modernism and the past. Aaron wants to try the kinds of hip books that generate income and asks Isaac what he thinks the world has become. And Isaac says, ‘It’s the way people read, the way they perceive, there’s no more silence to life, it’s just static and white noise and fireworks and boredom all around you…We lose money because we do something that is no longer held to be vital, we’re a side-thought to life. You will just become part of … the big carcinogenic pile of trash, building up all around you.’
“And when I say that (in character) it’s as if I’m talking about the internet, like looking at my daughter’s generation, because I’m hard-pressed to see a book in their hands and what that means to society and culture. With current geopolitical concerns and neo-Nazism on the ascent again, all this thematic stuff seems less dated than when we first presented the play.”
Rob Morrow
There’s a key dramatic element: A postcard painted by Adolf Hitler in 1916, when he showed signs of having artistic talent. It’s the most prized object in Isaac’s collection of Nazi artifacts, letters and books that he is selling off, piece by piece.
Morrow explains that “Isaac muses about Hitler as an artist, talks about what the day and sky were like when Hitler painted it, when he was only a teenager. It freaks him out, fascinates and scares him. How is it that someone who engendered such massive horrors upon mankind, could at one time, in his more innocent youth, have painted this, and then do what he did.”
I asked Morrow what he thinks are the most complicated and compelling things about the play. “The feelings, the emotions and the language are most compelling. It’s preternatural that Robbie could have written this when he was 27, with insight into the existential dilemma of someone in their 60s, who went through what he went through. And the way he structures the cadences, the way the characters speak, he adds all the ellipses, the little stops and starts; it’s kind of like what David Mamet does.
“And what’s most complicated is that you can see everyone’s side. It’s the family dynamic, it’s so hard to maneuver, thrive and overcome the traumas of the past. The ambiguities are what makes it complicated in a good sense. The best message I can pull out of it is that the traumas of our past will haunt us until—and if—we can reconcile them.”
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photos of The Substance of Fire by Alex Neher
The Substance of Fire
produced by John Ruskin and Michael R. Myers
Ruskin Group Theatre, 3000 Airport Avenue in Santa Monica; free onsite parking
Fri & Sat at 8; Sun at 2
ends on September 1, 2024
for tickets, call 310.397.3244 or visit Ruskin
Sarah A. Spitz is an award-winning public radio producer, retired from KCRW, where she also produced arts stories for NPR. She writes features and reviews for various print and online publications.
