“Do you know what the great tragedy of my life is,” Zero Mostel – as channeled by Jim Brochu – says to the young reporter interviewing him on the stage of St. Clement’s Church. “With 15 Broadway shows, 25 movies and 10,000 paintings left behind, you know how I’m going to be forever known? ‘Ah yes, Mostel, he’s the fat guy from ‘The Producers.’’”
 
The reporter is actually the audience, and the interview is “Zero Hour,” Brochu’s one-man show, directed by Oscar-nominated actress Piper Laurie in her directorial debut, about the “roaring, bellowing wild animal” who was one of the funniest entertainers of the 20th century.
 
It is of course a joke to call Zero Mostel’s role in the 1968 Mel Brooks comedy “The Producers” his great tragedy. He actually had plenty of real tragedies. His devout immigrant parents disowned him when he married somebody outside the faith – an experience oddly echoed when he in effect played his parents as the first Tevye of “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway. Fatalists always talk about how any day they could get hit by a bus; Mostel was in fact one day hit by the M-86 cross-town bus — the driver had lost control of it – almost costing him his leg, and putting him in the hospital for six months. The setback that Brochu spends the most time on is Mostel’s victimization during the Red Scare: He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and could not find work for ten years. The one scene in the play in which we hear another voice is an investigator (in recorded voice-over) interrogating Mostel during one of the infamous hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
 
“I’ve had a thousand doors slammed in my face,” Zero/Brochu says, “but I stand on the other side of those closed doors and pound and scratch and scream saying “let me in!….How can you exclude the life of the party?”
 
He was in fact so funny that his childhood dream of being a painter was derailed; his lectures on art were so interspersed with one-liners that it led to a career as a nightclub entertainer, which led to Hollywood and, after the blacklist, to Broadway.
 
Brochu, who met Mostel many times, has fashioned a script and a performance that tries to show us a man, reminiscing in his artist’s studio in 1977 shortly before his death, who was mercurial, manic, explosive, abrasive, nearly abusive, but always amusing. The show is laced with throwaway one-liners, some of them with a taste of the Borscht Belt (“You know what they say, where there’s smoke, there’s salmon.”)
 
The show is a love letter, which Brochu (co-writer of the musicals “The Last Session” and “The Big Voice: God or Merman”) has been performing around the country for some three years. (Earlier versions apparently had him singing, which he does not do in this one.) That “Zero Hour” was destined to land in New York, home for both the performer and his character, is perhaps presaged in Brochu’s 1964 yearbook from La Salle Military Academy in Brooklyn: “Jim, the Zero Mostel of La Salle, is known for his substantial size, wit and for being first soloist in the Glee Club …He will do well either as an actor or a writer.”
 
Note: The blacklist played such a large part in Zero Mostel’s life,  and in “Zero Hour”, that on Tuesday, November 24th at 7p.m., there will be a free “sneak peek” of the show followed  by a panel discussion entitled “Survivors of the Blacklist,” moderated by Congressman Jerrold Nadler and “scheduled to appear Jules Feiffer, Victory Navasky,Christopher Trumbo (son of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo), Joe Gilford (playwright son of Madeline Lee and Jack Gilford) and the actors Jean Rouverol and Cliff Carpenter.
 
The Zero Hour, written and performed by Jim Brochu
Theater at St. Clement’s (423 West 46th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues), through January 31, 2010.
Directed by Piper Laurie
Scenic design by Josh Iacovelli, lighting design by Jason Arnold
Running time: about 2 hours with intermission.
Ticket prices: $35 and $55

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