TV Reviews : ‘The Hollow Boy’ Lifts Short Story Genre

The short story is particularly and peculiarly American in its development, its brevity and tone. But the genre’s adaptation to the small screen seldom achieves the mastery you keep looking for. Tonight, however, is golden.

You won’t find a more tender example of a provocative short story adapted into a luminous hourlong teleplay than “The Hollow Boy” on “American Playhouse” at 9 on KCET Channel 28. (It also airs Friday at 9 p.m. on KPBS Channel 15.)

The production, based on a short story by Hortense Calisher and set in 1936 in New York City, is quietly spellbinding. The entire production, directed by Noel Black and featuring endearing performances by Jerry Stiller as a loving father and Alexis Arquette as a sensitive young neighbor boy, is like discovering crushed flowers in a family photo album.

The plot is a coming-of-age yarn told in a stillness by adapter Jay Neugeboren that’s fathoms deep. The production’s lingering, sweet sound is the chamber music played by a Jewish-American family in their airy Manhattan apartment while a dour German immigrant family across the airshaft looks on with barely concealed contempt.

The show’s simplicity is disarming. In its most sublime device, two teen-aged boys from culturally diverse families (Arquette as the German boy and Marty Finkelstein as his Jewish friend) reach out to one another through their adjacent apartment windows on the Upper West Side.

Gradually, the shy German youth is lured out of his Puritan life into the wondrous realm of his friend’s sunny Jewish family, of outdoor music concerts and a home where people revel in brash harmony.

Meanwhile, the German family woefully looks on, pursuing a hard, humorless work ethic. Finally, the German father, a waiter, slams the window and forbids his son to have anything to do with “the lazy Jews.” Read his lips.

The immigrant materialists pay a terrible but deserved price for their oafishness. The end is not a shattering tragedy but it’s hauntingly numbing. Here’s television drama that unspools like a prose poem.