Stars convening for huge festival to celebrate one of NJ's best-known writers

Very few writers own a town. Raymond Chandler's L.A., August Wilson's Pittsburgh, Dickens' London — each is a self-contained universe, with its own set of characters and mythology, known to millions who never set foot there.

To these, add Philip Roth's Newark. It's the town he put on the literary map. And this week, Newark is saying thank you.

"Newark is bred-in-the-bone in Roth's writing," said John Schreiber, president and CEO of NJPAC, which is honoring Roth with a three-day festival this weekend.

"He used Newark as a canvas for so much of what he wrote," Schreiber said. "It's the basis of his writing to a great extent. Newark is a through line. He loved Newark, and he never lost touch with it."

NJPAC's Philip Roth Festival — Friday March 17 to Sunday March 19 — will feature a who's who of literati, glitterati, and some of the more thoughtful Hollywood and New York actors. Among them: Sam Waterston, Cynthia Nixon, Tony Shalhoub, Eric Bogosian, Peter Riegert, Michael Benjamin Washington, John Turturro, Matthew Broderick, Sean Wilentz, Darryl Pinckney, Susan Cho, and many others.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who died in 2018, will be celebrated with bus tours of his old neighborhood, audio presentations, panel discussions, a reading by Morgan Spector of the controversial 1959 short story "Defender of the Faith" (1 p.m. March 18, NJPAC), and in such major NJPAC events as "Philip Roth Unbound" (7 p.m. March 17, $29) featuring Matthew Broderick and Peter Riegert, and a staged reading of "The Plot Against America" (1 p.m. March 19, $99) featuring, among others, Eric Bogosian, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Riegert, Tony Shalhoub, Michael Benjamin Washington and Sam Waterston.

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This last, of course, dramatizes the 2004 novel — basis for the 2020 miniseries — about an alternate-history America of the 1940s where isolationist Charles Lindbergh, not Roosevelt, has won the presidential election. The result is that America gradually descends into fascism — a story that many people, given certain events of 2016, saw as eerily prophetic.

"I was startled by how allegorical 'The Plot Against America' seemed, after a couple of years of [the Trump] administration," David Simon ("The Wire," "Treme"), who adapted the miniseries, told NorthJersey.com and The Record in 2020. "It's really remarkable."

But for Roth, above all, "Plot" was another chance to examine life in the Jewish Newark of his youth.

Inner conflicts

Roth, born in 1933, came from the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, and graduated from Weequahic High School in 1950. ("A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense," the yearbook said of him.) His parents were first-generation Americans. All of this probably had something to do with Roth's chosen field of study: the mental — and sexual — conflicts that result when the conservative codes of the old country clash with the assimilationist drives of the new one.

"Portnoy's Complaint," (1969), his most notorious book, is about the proverbial Nice Jewish Boy who is — inside — a raging mass of lust and shameful impulses.

The conflict, in this case, is between a traditional old-school Jewish upbringing and the powerful siren song of America, with its racy values and sexy pop culture. It was the notorious scene where Portnoy — let us say — pleasures himself with a piece of refrigerator meat that caused the book to be banned in Australia, and in many U.S. libraries. It also made Roth into a celebrity.

Older readers remember Roth for "Goodbye Columbus" (1959), and for his series of novels centering around his alter-ego Zuckerman — "The Ghost Writer" (1979), "Zuckerman Unbound" (1981) and more. Younger readers discovered him with the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Pastoral" (1997) and "The Human Stain" (2000), also featuring Zuckerman, which in 2003 was adapted into the inevitable Major Motion Picture, starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman.

For more information...

Visit njpac.org or call 888 466-5722

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Philip Roth fest lists Matthew Broderick, Sam Waterston among celebs