by D. Jette

  

Alot of plays are made about the events leading up to the Holocaust, and with good reason.  My partner in last Saturday’s viewing of The Accomplices, a rehashed production by The Fountain Theatre, remarked that “If most of my relatives were murdered not fifty-odd years ago, I wouldn’t make plays about anything else.”  One of theatre’s primary cultural functions is to address collective sorrow and regret and often, through moral or example, to show us how to live in the face of tragedy and death. 

 

Upon entering the Odyssey Theatre and taking my seat among the sold-out crowd, I realized I was a part of a culturally cathartic experience.  The play is sponsored in large part by the Israeli Leadership Council and attended by a steady flow of elderly Jewish Angelenos, enough to bring this production a second life at the Odyssey.  Because of their cathartic value, and their support from cultural and religious institutions, plays like this will always have a place on the American stage.  Conversely, they will remain moralistic and serve a specific cultural purpose - to provide a rallying point and a release for a people who have generations of woe to carry through their lives. 

 

In The Accomplices, playwright Bernard Weinraub has dramatized the life and activism of Hillel Kook, a.k.a. Peter Bergson, a vocal critic of the Roosevelt administration and its failure to rescue Jewish refugees from German-occupied Europe. Weinraub shows us Kook’s life from his emigration to the United States as a young Zionist firebrand, to his now famous “Day the Rabbis Marched” when he led five hundred orthodox rabbis to the gates of the White House, only to be snubbed by the President.  The picture painted is of an impatient yet incorruptible idealist and his fight against a stodgy, ignorant and ultimately cowardly establishment. 

 

Kook, and through his characterization, Weinraub, levels criticism at Rabbi Steven Wise and the Jewish leadership in America, blaming them for being too cautious and too loyal to the U.S. Government, and at Roosevelt for leaving an obstructionist like Breckenridge Long in charge of refugee immigration.  Like many plays about the Holocaust, this play spreads the blame around and reminds us that the Nazis were not the only villains, that they had accomplices.

 

The play is not a biopic, as it centers around a specific period of Kook’s life and avoids a candid discussion of the figure it portrays.  Kook/Bergsen, for example, was a member of the Irgud, a paramilitary group which operated against the British Empire in Palestine before the war and continued to be a thorn in the side of moderate Israeli politics until after the Altalena affair, an armed conflict which landed several members of Israel’s Parliament, including Kook, in jail.  For Weinraub’s purposes, Kook is an innocent idealist who, for better or worse, challenged his elders and the American authorities to do the right thing.  Identifying him as a revolutionary Zionist would be redundant in this atmosphere and would muddy the play’s clear moral conclusion.

 

Deborah LaVine has made some great choices in the cast and some mistakes in how to handle them.  Until this show, I had not had the pleasure to watch Malachi Throne in cinema or on stage before, but I must commend him for his prodigious talent and godly speaking voice.  His performance as Steven Wise, the conflicted ‘Pope of the Jews’, anchors the show and helps keep the play from going to far in its portrayal of the people it criticizes.  Brian Carpenter does the opposite as Breckenridge Long, playing the shamed immigration official as a comically evil boob who seems to take nothing seriously.  Time Winters’ turn as President Roosevelt is similar in its lack of gravity, although both of these examples can probably be blamed on the script which gives little weight to these powerful men.

 

Hillel Kook/Peter Bergson is played by actor/musician Steven Schub, frontman for the Yiddish ska band the Fenwicks.  You can see one of their videos here!  (It’s 90’s retro, in an awesome way.)  Schub reprises this role from the Fountain’s original production and plays it with such consistency and fire that he carries the play.  As good as he is, I must remark on the poor use of dialect throughout the show, from Schub especially.  There were many moments when his Palestinian accent turned Brooklyn, and others when his emotional truth seemed interrupted by his stumbling tongue.  Directors and their dialect coaches should never send actors on stage before they are ready to speak with an accent.

 

Also notable was William Dennis Hurley as Samuel Merlin.  His humour throughout the play reminded me of a particular moment in Schindler’s List when Schindler tells Itzhak Stern that they’ll have a drink when the war is over.  Stern says with a smirk, ’I think I’d better have mine now,’ showing a morbid sense of humour in the face of apparent doom.  Hurley also has a moment late in the show which transcends the script’s historical quaintness and touched me deeply.  

 

The set consists mostly of a desk and chairs, moving around between blackouts to portray all manner of offices.  Decorating the walls are Stonehenge-like columns of yellow-paper and grey boxes, echoing the theme of refugees-as-troublesome-paperwork and breaking up the visual space.  There are superfluous projections with news footage, and a fun hide-away bar in the President’s desk, all parts of a functional design that serves the story well.

 

I recommend this play to anyone looking to share their regret about American anti-Semitism during an era when our intervention would have meant salvation for millions of European Jews.  There are moments where the message is subtle, and yet others when we are reminded in droning voices to “Never Forget.”  As long as talented artists apply themselves to plays like The Accomplices we will not forget its lessons: that evil men are victorious only when good men do nothing to stop them.

 

 For reservations and information, call (323) 663-1525 or go to www.FountainTheatre.com.

Categories: Reviews
Tags: Odyssey Theatre