It’s a long walk from Montreal to Brooklyn. But in 1957, bar mitzvah boy Murray Meyer decided to make the trek. He didn’t get far, but the experience stayed with him.
Now the 60-year-old Meyer has turned that part of his life into theater.
Meyer’s one-man show “Walking Back to Brooklyn” makes its Bay Area premiere at the upcoming 14th annual San Francisco Fringe Festival.
Meyer says the hour-long play recounts his childhood “in Brooklyn and being woken up in the middle of the night to be told we were moving to Montreal. It’s about my unhappiness from being torn away from the Garden of Eden, which is Brooklyn.”
The play explores the inner turmoil of a boy on the verge of teenage angst. He confronts such major topics as sex, his dysfunctional family and the hostility between Montreal’s Jewish and French Canadian communities.
“My bar mitzvah was coming up,” says Meyer. “I wanted to avoid it, so I had this idea I could walk to Brooklyn. I told no one, made sandwiches, had five dollars in my pocket. I got to the middle of the Jacques Cartier Bridge before turning back. The play ends with my bar mitzvah.”
Though a long-established Los Angeles-based defense attorney, Meyer’s late stab at the stage came about after he took a playwriting course — just for fun. Turned out all that experience making a case in front of a jury was good training for the actor-to-be.
He started writing “Walking Back to Brooklyn” three years ago, and though it’s gone through many changes, he did perform the play at other Fringe festivals in Seattle, Toronto and, appropriately enough, Montreal. Meyer’s wife, Laurel Ollstein, an actress/playwright and former San Francisco State student, directed the show.
Though not religious, Meyer reveres his Jewish heritage. Those influences naturally impacted the play. “I didn’t intend to write a Jewish story,” he says, “but I realized it was very Jewish. It involved our lives as a minority within a minority.”
And though “Walking to Brooklyn” has earned good reviews in every town he’s taken it, Meyer isn’t quite ready to trade his legal briefs for a life in the theater. He’s still a hard-working lawyer.
“I am not retired,” he says. “I was just at a sentencing this morning.” Turned out his client was sentenced to 100 years to life for the drive-by killing of two people. Given the more encouraging response to his play, maybe Meyer should quit his day job.