(Anita Gates’s article appeared in The New York Times, 12/28; via Pam Green.)
Brad Zimmerman may well have brought many of us a salad or a mac and cheese once. Now, in “My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy,” he brings us the story of his failure, and it’s pretty delicious. As Mr. Zimmerman admits, a typical proud mom might brag about her son vacationing in the Caribbean or buying a big, new house; his mother has to tell her friends, “If all goes well, Brad is buying a bookcase.”
The low-key Mr. Zimmerman, who waited tables in New York for almost three decades while planning to become a famous actor, proves in this solo show that we have yet to hear every variation on a would-be actor’s struggles or a Jewish mother’s disappointment. His topics are a mix of the familiar and the mordant, with jokes about plane travel, supermodels on talk shows, his uneventful love life, a reality-show concept that involves a Kardashian and a sniper, and how gentile mothers react when their sons have to break dinner dates with them (“O.K.”).