It's easy to understand why Danny Aiello would be attracted to "The Shoemaker," a ramshackle little play about as sturdy as a pair of broken-heeled pumps. The titular Italian-Jewish cobbler in Susan Charlotte's three-person melodrama gets to cry an ocean of tears, scream himself hoarse, dramatically fling footwear around his shop, and argue with disembodied voices. It's an opportunity to act up a storm, and Aiello takes full advantage of it, delivering a showy and obvious performance that blatantly calls attention to itself. Charlotte's script is equally transparent in its attempts to jerk tears from an undiscerning audience. The playwright superficially examines and draws sketchy parallels between the World Trade Center tragedy and the Holocaust, reducing both catastrophic events to soap opera fodder.
The play opens on Sept. 11, 2001, with the shoemaker—the character's name is not listed in the program, but he refers to himself as Giuseppe—weeping as he listens to opera arias on the radio. He's shut down his midtown Manhattan shop, which also serves as his home, in reaction to the horrific events of the day. His reveries are interrupted by the equally overcome Hilary, a Columbia film studies teacher, who bursts into his establishment to get a sole repaired, but whose soul also needs to be healed. Get the symbolism?
Her real purpose is to give the shoemaker a reason to talk about another customer, an investment banker named Louise who may have perished in the terrorist attack, as well as his strained relationship with his daughter and the members of his family who were taken to Auschwitz. This is one of those plays in which total strangers reveal their life stories to each other at the drop of a hat. After an hour of exposition and mutual consolation, Hilary departs and Louise unexpectedly enters as the lights black out. In Act 2, we discover that Louise may be a figment of Giuseppe's imagination, like the voices of his long-dead father and the German occupiers of his hometown. These unseen spirits punctuate a lengthy final monologue during which Aiello chews up Ray Klausen's detailed set.
The program notes state that the play was originally a one-act, which is what it should have remained. The entire first act is unnecessary, as it doesn't impart any information we don't learn in the second. The whole piece is about 90 minutes with an intermission but feels like several hours, thanks to director Antony Marsellis' uncertain and uneven pacing.
Alma Cuervo has the impossible task of making Hilary, who is little more than a sounding board for the shoemaker, into a three-dimensional person. She tries her best, but this talented stage veteran is reduced to just listening and crying. She does the former eloquently, but there is too much of the latter. Lucy DeVito fares better, giving Louise's musings on her own fractured connection to her father a refreshing simplicity. I wish Aiello and Charlotte had applied the same technique.
Presented by Cause Célèbre at the Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC. July 24–Aug. 14. Thu. and Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 239-6200, (800) 432-7250, or www.telecharge.com.