Alan Gross returns with 'High' expectations

Fans of Chicago theater who go back decades will remember the name Alan Gross. The playwright had a handful of hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But in the mid-'80s, Gross left town to try his luck in Hollywood, a venture that didn't turn out like he'd hoped. More about that later.

So it's been years since he's had a show staged in Chicago but that's about to change. Gross' newest work, "High Holidays," opens Monday at the Goodman Theatre under the direction of his old friend, Steven Robman.

The story revolves around young Billy Roman (Max Zuppa) and his anxiety-ridden preparations for his bar mitzvah in 1963 north suburban Chicago. When his older brother Rob (Ian Paul Custer) returns home for the holidays, tensions escalate between the brothers' ideas about their futures and those of their parents, Essie (Rengin Altay) and Nate (Keith Kupferer).

The dark comedy is inspired by Gross' family experience growing up in Skokie.

"I concentrated on the two places where things came together in my life," Gross, 62, said. "The bar mitzvah business and the leaving home business."

Gross' earlier work can be categorized as either work comedies or romantic comedies. What he has constructed here is a family comedy-drama. The idea began to formulate after his mother passed away. Many of the "shards of her existence" came into his possession, and he began to think about her life.

"As a man of late middle-age, I see things much different now than I did as a young man," Gross said. "I have a better understanding of what my parents were going through. They bought into the whole little house in the suburbs idea. Back then, I just found it a drag."

Robman feels it's a universal story about "passing the baton from one generation to the next."

"Sometimes this is a really tough transition in families," Robman said. "A time for kids to have their own lives and points of view. It's a very fundamental thing within families."

In 1977, Gross' comedy-of-manners, "Lunching," was a hit for Body Politic Theatre. After a three-month run there, it moved to Drury Lane Theatre in Water Tower Place, the first off-Loop play to transfer to a larger, commercial theater. He also had a hit with "The Man in 605" which had a short Off-Broadway run.

Into the '80s, several other plays got good reviews. But in 1986, Gross left Chicago for Hollywood where he hoped to make a name for himself by writing screenplays.

"I wanted to write '400 Blows' and be Truffaut," Gross said, referring to the French director and his seminal work. "But all they wanted was 'Batman.'"

Gross spent a frustrating 14 years in Los Angles before returning to Chicago in 2000. He and his wife Norma live in Old Town where they had lived decades ago.

"It was very depressing," Gross said. "I wrote a dozen screenplays and they were all optioned. But none of them got done. It took the fun out of life but the fun is back now."

What changes does Gross see in the Chicago theater scene?

"A lot of the guys I know have either lost their hair or gone white," Gross said, laughing. "Once young bucks, they're now playing grandpas."

••"High Holidays" opens Monday and continues through Nov. 29 at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn. For tickets ($15-$40), call (312) 443-3800; www.goodmantheatre.org.