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THEATRE REVIEWS

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT BY SHIRLEY LAURO

IRENA'S VOW—A BRILLIANT PLAY THAT HONORS A HOLOCAUST HEROINE
Review by Rochelle G. Saidel, 2009

A NEW PLAY ABOUT THE UNITED STATES AND HOLOCAUST RESCUE
Review by Rochelle G. Saidel, 2007

All Through the Night By Shirley Lauro
Directed by Melanie Moyer Williams
Featuring Theo Allyn*, Hana Kalinski, Michelle Lookadoo*, Lesley McBurney*,  and Andrea Sooch*

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT speaks directly with a warning for today. Inspired by interviews with German Gentile women, and set during and after the Third Reich, the play is both stylistic and surrealistic, sweeping through the women's teen years and young adulthood during the Holocaust and then beyond. The Nazi Regime impacts the women's lives as they struggle over education, work, religion, marriage and motherhood. Making overwhelmingly hard choices, they survive or succumb to Hitler's Reign and are changed forever.

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT's New York Premiere runs October 2-25, 2009 at The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater ( 5 West 64th Street @ Central Park West).  Tickets may be purchased at www.redferntheatre.org or by calling 212-352-3101.

Show Schedule:
Friday, October 2 @ 8pm (Preview)
Saturday, October  3 @ 8pm (Preview)
Sunday, October  4 @ 3pm (Preview)
Monday, October 5 @ 8pm (Opening)

Wednesday, October 7 @ 8pm
Thursday, October  8 @ 8pm
Friday, October  9 @ 8pm
Saturday, October 10 @ 8pm
Sunday, October  11 @ 3pm
Wednesday, October 14 @ 8pm
Thursday, October  15 @ 8pm
Friday, October  16 @ 8pm
Saturday, October 17 @ 8pm
Sunday, October  18 @ 3pm
Wednesday, October 21 @ 8pm
Thursday, October  22 @ 8pm
Friday, October  23 @ 8pm
Saturday, October 24 @ 8pm
Sunday, October  25 @ 3pm (Closing)

Critical Praise from the Chicago Premiere for All Through the Night:
2006 Chicago's Joseph Jefferson Citation Nominee: “Best New Play of the Year”
"A significant serious and intensely moving new work......a compelling new play."
-Chris Jones, Senior Theatre Critic, Chicago Tribune
"Stirring...engrossing moments” -Dan Zeff,  Copley News Service
“Such a relevance to what is happening now... fascinating... the emotional side of war...”
- TimeOut Chicago
 “We may know history but this play is electrifying.”  - Louis Weissberg, Chicago Free Press

IRENA'S VOW—A BRILLIANT PLAY THAT HONORS A HOLOCAUST HEROINE
Reviewed by Rochelle G. Saidel

Irena's Vow
Starring Tovah Feldshuh
Walter Kerr Theater, Broadway and 48th Street, New York
http://irenasvow.com/
Opens March 29, 2009

Irena's Vow, which had a successful off-Broadway run, has come to the Walter Kerr Theater on Broadway. The play stars Tovah Feldshuh, is written by Dan Gordon, and directed by Michael Parva.

Tovah Feldshuh's performance is brilliant as Irena Gut Opdyke, who hid twelve Jews in the basement of a German officer's home in Poland during World War II. Based on a true story, this 95 minute one-act production moved many in the theater to tears. Feldshuh did not play Irena as a saint. Instead we saw a headstrong young woman who believed in behaving in is morally correct way, but also enjoyed a good cat and mouse game.

The play began with Irena as an older woman talking to American high school students in 1988, and then went back to Nazi-occupied Poland. We learned that Irena had already been gang-raped by soldiers at age seventeen on the Soviet side of divided Poland, and then managed to come back to Kozience on the German side to look (unsuccessfully) for her family. As a still teenaged nursing student, she was enlisted by the Nazis to work in a factory.  Nazi Major Rugemer took her from there to be in charge of his laundry, and then his personal housekeeper, in a Tarnapol villa.  In the major's laundry Irena encountered eleven Jews working as slave laborers. She ultimately hid them plus one more--right under the nose of Rugemer. She was even able to help one couple give birth to a baby in the major's basement. In the play, we see only three actors--playing Ida and Lazar Hollar and Fanka Silberman--representing the twelve hidden Jews.

When the major discovers Irena's ruse, he agrees to go along only if she submits to him sexually. While most victims of rape and sexual abuse during World War II have not been comfortable talking about their experiences, Irena's story includes her victimization by both the Russians and the Germans. Although not intended as such, this part of her story can almost be seen as the rape of Poland by its neighbors on both borders.

At the end of the play, the Hollar baby who had been born in the basement, now a man with a son of his own, comes to meet Irena and invite her to his son's bar mitzvah in Jerusalem in 1988. Irena died in May 2003.

The supporting cast and technical staff were all excellent and moved the story forward with skill. Thomas Ryan played Major Rugemer with a believable and broad range of emotions.

After the play, Irena's daughter Janina Smith spoke with the audience and answered questions. She explained that after decades of silence, her mother revealed her story, triggered by a phone call from a neo-Nazi doing a survey to “prove” the Holocaust had never happened. Smith also told an extraordinary story about how her mother finally was able to reunite with her four sisters in Poland.

The play includes verbal and background images that do not shy away from the brutal genocidal intentions of the Nazis. This is one story of a brave Polish Catholic woman who stood up to the Nazis at the peril of her own life, and saved Jewish lives. Her bravery has been recognized in Israel by Yad Vashem, where she has been named a Righteous Among the Nations, and her story is also told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her book, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer provides more details about her underground activities.

Two Irenas, Two Holocaust Heroines
When I first saw the title Irena's Vow, I admit that I was confused. I knew the story of Irena Sendler, a Catholic Polish heroine who rescued Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. I therefore thought that the play was about Sendler, rather than Irena Gut Opdyke. While I was clearly wrong, it is not inappropriate to also highlight here the achievements of Sendler, whose name has been better known.

Irena Sendler, who died in May 2008, five years after Irena Gut Opdyke, was also honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations.  She was born Irena Krzyzanowska in Otwock, Poland in 1910. She created a network of rescuers who smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, some of them hidden in coffins. She was head of the children’s bureau of Zegota, an underground organization set up to save Jews after the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.  Her group of about 30 volunteers, mostly women, brought Jewish infants, young children, and teenagers to safety.
See details at http://www.rememberwomen.org/Library/Essays/main.html#sendler. For more information, see http://www.irenasendler.org/

A NEW PLAY ABOUT THE UNITED STATES AND HOLOCAUST RESCUE
Review by Rochelle G. Saidel

The Accomplices
The New Group (Theatre Row, The Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., New York)
April 9 - May 5, 2007

THE ACCOMPLICES
A NEW PLAY ABOUT THE UNITED STATES AND HOLOCAUST RESCUE

The Accomplices, which opened April 9, 2007 and closed on May 5, should have a longer run. In this world premiere, The New Group (Theatre Row, The Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., New York) does an outstanding job of sharing with their audiences a chapter of United States history that is little known today.

Based on actual events, New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub's new play tells the story of a small group's effort to involve the organized Jewish community and the United States government in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. The play stars Daniel Sauli as Hillel Kook, also known as Peter Bergson. The staging, lighting, and performances are excellent. Zoe Lister-Jones skillfully portrays Betty, the woman who loves Kook and ultimately becomes his wife. Veteran David Margulies is superb as Rabbi Stephen Wise, a powerful establishment Jewish leader described in the play as the “Jewish Pope” in the United States. Jon DeVries plays both President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who is depicted doing as little as possible to help the Jews of Europe) and playwright Ben Hecht, a supporter of Bergson's efforts. This dual role, portraying two powerful men with opposing agendas, could be disorienting to the audience. Instead it somehow works to make them think about the contrast in these two historical figures' views.

As a historian of the Holocaust, rather than a drama critic, I found that the protagonists were perhaps a bit too black and white. Rabbi Wise certainly had his shortcomings, but surely can also be lauded for great accomplishments vis-a-vis the American Jewish community. And Hillel Kook, who the leaders of the American Jewish community and the United States government tried to paint as a fringe upstart, certainly had his merit as a voice in the wilderness trying to save the Jews of Europe. But the play seems to paint Wise as mainly the bad guy and Kook as the hero. Perhaps this is the stuff of good theatre, and this is indeed excellent theatre, but the situation in reality was often more blurred.

I am particularly pleased that new generations can learn a bit of history from this play about Cordell Hull, Breckenridge Long, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt and others who played roles in this life and death drama and the Roosevelt administration's policies. However, after the play I needed to come home and reread David Wyman's Abandonment of the Jews and Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died, two classics on this subject. Other scholarly works include Rafael Medoff's The Deafening Silence and a biography of Kook by Louis Rapoport, Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jewish of Europe. I hope that this fine political drama serves as a springboard for some serious post-theatre reading by other intrigued audience members, or even by those who have not had an opportunity to see the play. See www.thenewgroup.org for more information.

Rochelle G. Saidel