By Joe Pollack
When you were little, maybe slightly chubby, did you have a knack for making people laugh? Your parents, of course, and your grandparents, aunts and uncles were easy marks. They laughed at everything you said, and it thrilled you. In school, maybe you were the class clown, growing taller and better-looking in your mind whenever the kids giggled and the teacher glared, choking back amusement while threatening you with the direst of punishments.
Fear not. There’s hope. Maybe you can be a stage director like Edward Coffield, who’s filling in at the New Jewish Theatre this month. Coffield, whose primary job is production manager at the Rep, is directing What’s Wrong With This Picture?, a Donald Margulies comedy that had a pair of brief New York runs, first with Madeline Kahn, then with Faith Prince in the lead role—to be led here by Kat Singleton, with Alan Knoll as her bereaved husband. If the tiny black-box theater rocks with laughter, it’s Coffield’s doing. (Of course, it’s also his doing if the audience sits on its hands.) The odds are in his favor, because the play deals with the aftermath of a Jewish woman’s choking death caused by a piece of moo shu pork, a scenario that could immediately have his audience laughing through tears.
Coffield’s been a director for about a dozen years. “I’m naturally funny,” he maintains. “It runs in the family. My mother, if she was between tears and laughter, always would laugh, and my brother, Philip, could laugh out loud in the darkest situations.” Coffield pauses for a moment, then adds, “If you can get the audience to laugh, it’s easier to make them cry later on.”
