what i need: danny devito, dostädning, and hoarding

Amelia (Lucy DeVito) and Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas) try to cure Sam (Danny DeVito) of hoarding in Theresa Rebeck’s I Need That (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a hoarder.

Not a hoarder like the Collyer brothers, who died in their Harlem home in March 1947 — their bodies were not found for weeks, amid 140 tons of items they had collected over the years. (Langley and Homer have a park named after them on the site of where their brownstone was.)

Not a hoarder like Orthodox Brooklyn twins Abraham and Shraga, whose inability to throw anything away following the death of their parents was documented in the 2015 film Thy Father’s Chair.

And not a hoarder like Anna (Dale Sole) in Jay Stull’s play The Capables, which I called “a splendid debut about the things one collects in life, both physical and psychological.”

Which brings me to the new Broadway show I Need That, in which Danny DeVito portrays Sam, a widowed father who has not been able to get rid of anything in his New Jersey house since the death of his beloved wife three years earlier. The Roundabout production, continuing at the American Airlines Theatre through December 30, was written by Theresa Rebeck, who is a bit of a hoarder herself, this being her fifth work in sixteen years to make it to Broadway (following 2018’s Bernhardt/Hamlet, 2012’s Dead Accounts, 2011’s Seminar, and 2007’s Mauritius), more than any other living woman writer. (Agatha Christie also penned five plays that made it to the Great White Way.)

According to the DSM-5, hoarding is in the same class as obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I previously covered in “rhapsody in blue: oscar levant, ocd, and me.” It explains that hoarders have “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value. This difficulty is due to a perceived need to save the items and to the distress associated with discarding them. The difficulty discarding possessions results in the accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromises their intended use. If living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, or the authorities). The hoarding causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment safe for oneself or others).”

Sam is not just a hoarder but also an agoraphobic, never venturing outside.

I have two thousand records and two hundred CDs that I never listen to — and dozens of cassette tapes that I can’t listen to. I have a thousand books that I’ve read and even more that I haven’t gotten to yet but believe I eventually will someday.

I have a handful of old digital cameras that don’t work anymore; my first Walkman, from the early 1980s; trinkets from art exhibits and immersive shows; about a hundred rolled-up posters that I will never get framed and hang on the wall; a box of dice, poker chips, and cards that I’ve never used but keep around in case we ever host a game night, which we never will.

Behind me right now are a dozen boxes that I haven’t opened since I packed them up from my downtown office and started working remotely from home. We have a closet of stuff I haven’t looked in for two years and can barely open because the handle gets stuck.

It’s part OCD, part superstition, part hope that some of these myriad items might be worth something on eBay, though I’ve never sold a single thing there. But I also have a story for each object, a cool memory, a fond recollection reminding me of moments from my past.

A Parker pen from grade school was given to me by a friend who everyone lost contact with after high school and we haven’t located to this day. A press pass to a music festival is a souvenir from when I got electrocuted at the food court there. I have ticket stubs from more than a thousand live performances that I have been swearing I will organize for decades as I add yet more (and am disappointed when tickets are only available via PDF or QR code). Somewhere is the bent thumbtack that a boy named Freddie gave me in sixth grade, claiming that it had been sat on by Queen Elizabeth; all he wanted in exchange was for me to help him cheat on a test.

As I noted a few weeks back in “steve martin needs his table,” I wrote that, in Carl Reiner’s The Jerk, when Steve Martin’s character, Navin Johnson, gets kicked out of his mansion by his wife (Bernadette Peters), he pathetically cries out, “I don’t need this stuff!,” sweeping piles of letters off his desk. “And I don’t need you! I don’t need anything!” Navin, in a ratty bathrobe, pants around his ankles, then notices an ashtray and, picking it up, declares, “Except this.” Soon his arms are full of random objects and he’s heading to the front door. “I don’t need one other thing,” he calls out. “Not one — I need this,” he whimpers, grabbing an ordinary chair.

That scene is embedded deep in my brain.

In I Need That, Sam is regularly visited by his daughter, Amelia (played by his real-life daughter, Lucy DeVito), and his best, and apparently only, friend, Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas). They both are trying to get Sam to throw stuff away, with no success, even as he faces eviction by the health and fire departments.

“You know, I’m organizing,” he tells Foster, who responds, “You need to organize some of this right out the door.”

When Foster picks up a bottle cap, Sam explains, “It’s sixty-seven years old. It’s worth something.” Foster says, “Sixty-seven-year-old bottle cap isn’t worth anything.” But that sets Sam off on one of his heartfelt stories defending his collection.

“That’s what you think. That’s from my youth,” he begins. “Okay. When I was a kid I used to sell sodas at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Bingo, every Friday night. grape Fanta, cream soda, that kind of Jamaican lemon lime. They’d bring this big block of ice by the bingo hall and I’d chop it up to put the bottles in it, keep ’em cold. All night people are yelling at me, Bring me a soda! Bring me a soda! The place was always packed. Father John up there calling out the numbers, it was crazy. Those little plastic chips, the little bingo chips. I got some of those around here too. . . . The priest used to make me pick ’em put and put them in those little glassine bags, twelve to a bag, they’d resell ’em for a dime. They’re here somewhere.”

The woman in the apartment next to ours is a constant reminder of what could be. She is more than a bit obsessive; once a week she puts on a hazmat suit and thoroughly cleans every nook and cranny in her apartment until every surface glitters. One of our cats once ran inside and, in chasing her, I saw how immaculately spotless the woman’s space is.

In his November 9 “Moving Targets” column in the Wall Street Journal, “A ‘Virtual’ Solution for the Hoarder in Your Life,” humorist and playwright Joe Queenan describes a new way to help hoarders: virtual reality.

“This is real, so to speak,” he writes. “Working from the assumption that hoarding is a damaging psychological condition and not just an annoying habit, the researchers got previously incorrigible pack rats to take videos and photos of their treasured possessions. From those, Stanford University engineering students and a VR company created custom 3-D virtual environments. The participants could then navigate their cluttered rooms using VR headsets and handheld controllers, identifying items overdue for the trash heap and removing them — virtually, that is.”

Pointing out his own hoarding of certain items, Queenan, cofounder of Knowledge Workings Theater, explains, “Lots of us have homes filled to overflowing with stuff we don’t need, but letting go is hard. Virtual reality could help us realize how these loads of rubbish are obscuring our fields of vision and preventing us from getting things done. Or in some cases, tripping us and leading to nasty falls.”

I have had those nasty falls.

Oh, I must make something clear; this is my problem, not my wife’s. Most of what I’m talking about is in my home office and a few closets. If you visited our apartment, you wouldn’t be freaked out. Yes, our bookcases are overflowing and there are cat toys everywhere, but if you stay out of my office and the closets, you would not think that we were on a Collyer-like path.

My wife keeps trying to get me to agree to have her friend and client, Amanda Sullivan, author of Organized Enough: The Anti-Perfectionist’s Guide to Getting — and Staying — Organized, come over and help me. It might not surprise you that I don’t like people touching my things. As Francis “Psycho” Soyer (Conrad Dunn) says to his fellow soldiers in Ivan Reitman’s Stripes, “I don’t like nobody touching my stuff. Just keep your meat hooks off. If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you.” His soliloquy is followed by the classic catchphrase from Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates), “Lighten up, Francis.”

Will I be able to lighten my load? I truly like to think so. I have all kinds of plans to sell lots of books, CDs, and DVDs to BOOKOFF on Forty-Fifth St.; empty out cluttered areas and throw out un-donate-able clothing, magazines, and toys; and go through the three years’ worth of newspapers I have from when I ran a free local weekly, cutting out my articles and recycling the rest.

Then again, just yesterday, I went to see the closing of Rob Pruitt’s “The Golden Hour” at 303 Gallery in Chelsea. In conjunction with recent sunset paintings, Pruitt was undergoing a dostädning, or “death purge,” in which he was relieving himself of hundreds of items from his home, studio, and storage space. Initially he was selling them at bargain-basement rates, with all money benefiting the International Committee of the Red Cross, but on the last day everything was free (and donations accepted). He had decided to conduct the purge shortly after turning sixty this past May, exactly seven days before I reached that milestone; he also has an autoimmune disease similar to mine, which influenced the show.

Rob Pruitt began purging his belongings once he reached a specific time in his life (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

So I understood where he was coming from. Determined to leave with some object, I went through the gallery several times before deciding on a fab cigar box, where I can now put small objects, say, dice, poker chips, and cards.

In Rebeck’s play, directed by Tony nominee Moritz von Stuelpnagel, when a thoroughly frustrated Amelia criticizes her father’s organizational processes, Sam declares, “You can’t just throw out everything. You have to figure out what you want to keep, and what you can let go. It’s like Sophie’s Choice.”

If only life were as simple as the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “What You Need,” in which an old street peddler named Pedott (Ernest Truex) has a small case filled with random objects that are exactly what various individuals need, whether they realize it or not. Pedott acknowledges, “One needs many different things,” but he also tells a disillusioned client in search of an escape, “The things you need most I can't supply.” The episode first aired on Christmas night.

The Stanford Medicine study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Psychiatric Research, reports that “for those with hoarding disorder — a mental condition estimated to affect 2.5% of the U.S. population — the reluctance to let go can reach dangerous and debilitating levels.”

I’m far from those levels; I publicly promise that I will agree to have Amanda come over if it gets any worse.

The funny and touching play ultimately takes a disappointing turn near the end, when it reverses one of its major themes, the question of value, in the interest of forced drama; otherwise, it is worth seeing, particularly for DeVito’s dazzling performance and Alexander Dodge’s scenic design.

Speaking of value, I don’t want to take up any more of your valuable time. As I’m signing off, I’m looking around my home office, deciding what I can definitely get rid of.

Oh, but I need that . . . and maybe that too . . . and then there’s that. . . .

[You can follow Mark Rifkin and This Week in New York every day here.]