Theater

The Play on Madoff, Without Wiesel

By PATRICK HEALY
Published: July 19, 2010

HUDSON, N.Y. — Two months after Elie Wiesel used legal threats to shut down a play that imagined his relationship with his former money manager, Bernard L. Madoff, that work — revised, with a new character replacing Mr. Wiesel — will have its first performances this week. The playwright, Deborah Margolin, is also trying to move forward, yet remains deeply shaken by her clash with Mr. Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor.

“This has been a profoundly painful experience, and I’m still scared to talk about it, because I can’t get sued, there’s no way I could afford it,” Ms. Margolin said in an interview last week before a rehearsal of “Imagining Madoff.” That play is scheduled to run from Wednesday through Aug. 7 at Stageworks/Hudson, a theater company in this town, about 30 miles south of Albany.

“But I also didn’t want to abandon this play,” said Ms. Margolin, an Obie Award-winning writer who teaches in the theater studies program at Yale University. Her ties to Stageworks, a 100-seat theater in a former flypaper factory, helped the suddenly controversial play to see the light of day.

Ms. Margolin is best known for her one-woman shows, including “Three Seconds in the Key,” about receiving a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease. She was drawn to understand Mr. Madoff by imagining an encounter between him and Mr. Wiesel, one of his most famous victims. Mr. Wiesel and his wife lost their life savings in Mr. Madoff’s billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and their charitable foundation lost $15.2 million. Mr. Wiesel, who declined to comment for this article, has publicly referred to Mr. Madoff as a “scoundrel” and “thief.”

The original play, with the Wiesel character, was supposed to be performed at a theater in Washington, until that production was scuttled in May under pressure from Mr. Wiesel. Stageworks/Hudson is now producing the revised work, in which “Wiesel” has been replaced by a new character, a Holocaust survivor and poet named Solomon Galkin.

But Victor A. Kovner, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine who is representing Ms. Margolin pro bono, said he did not believe the writer faced the threat of a lawsuit.

“The play she has decided to complete and that will be opening shortly is not about Mr. Wiesel at all,” Mr. Kovner said.

The Wiesel character in the earlier script was no passing contrivance. Ms. Margolin said she had seen the character as an ideal dramatic device, a name that would instantly connote moral authority. The central scene of the original play was an imagined conversation in which Wiesel pleaded with Madoff to invest his money. It also included a sexually tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp, as well as readings from the Talmud and meditations on repentance.

Wiesel spent much of the play cajoling and counseling Madoff, building up to a climactic moment in which the treacherous investor considered confessing his deceit to his wise and kindly companion.

The replacement character, Galkin, is described in the script as “80 years old, Holocaust survivor, poet, translator, treasurer of his synagogue.” But much of the original Wiesel dialogue has been retained and given to him, including the concentration camp memory and several provocative passages about morality and forgiveness.

Ms. Margolin said she had initially hoped that Mr. Wiesel would find the play compelling and thoughtful. But after she sent him a copy, Mr. Wiesel replied with a letter in April, saying he found the play to be “obscene” and “defamatory,” and in which he threatened to enlist his lawyers to stop its production. According to Ms. Margolin and her lawyer, Mr. Wiesel and his foundation’s representatives never specified what they considered obscene or defamatory.

At the time, Theater J in Washington, a company that specializes in Jewish-theme works and is part of the Jewish Community Center there, had committed to mounting “Imagining Madoff” in its fall 2010 season. Ms. Margolin and Ari Roth, the theater’s artistic director, discussed replacing the Wiesel figure; she went to work on rewriting while he continued talking to the Wiesel Foundation.

At the same time, Mr. Roth said he worried that a quick fix would be difficult. “I imagined it would be a challenge to endow the vividness and authority of Wiesel to an unknown like Solomon Galkin,” Mr. Roth said.

As a good-faith gesture, Mr. Roth said he told the foundation that he would share a copy of the rewritten script, to demonstrate that Wiesel was gone. But Ms. Margolin thought the gesture was tantamount to giving approval rights to Mr. Wiesel. (Mr. Roth said, “There was no intention or invitation for Mr. Wiesel to offer approval.”)

Ms. Margolin decided in May to pull the play from Theater J and offered it to Laura Margolis, the artistic director of Stageworks/Hudson. The two had worked together on a short-play festival in 2009 at Stageworks, and Ms. Margolis had read the original draft of “Imagining Madoff.” She accepted and added the play, which she is directing, to the Stageworks schedule.

Neither woman believes, ultimately, that anything has been lost with the replacement of the Wiesel character.

“Galkin also gave Deb more freedom and flexibility to expand on this man as a poet, as a leader of a synagogue, rather than being a famous-figure character that we might not be able to get close to,” Ms. Margolis said. Asked to assess how the artists at Theater J handled Mr. Wiesel’s concerns, Ms. Margolis took a long pause and studied the face of her playwright, Ms. Margolin, who still looked exhausted from the battle.

“All I want to say is that it’s important we not lose sight of what theater does, that we not mess up for the wrong reasons, and that the play not get lost in controversy,” the director said.

Mr. Roth of Theater J said he considered the play to be “indefinitely postponed,” and planned to see the Stageworks production and to consider “Imagining Madoff” for a future slot on his schedule.

The playwright, meanwhile, sidestepped most questions to which she might have said something critical — about Theater J, about First Amendment protections for playwrights and especially about Mr. Wiesel, whose name did not cross her lips during two hours of conversation.

“I didn’t set out to be on the wrong side of anybody, let alone someone I admire,” Ms. Margolin said. “What I’m hoping is that when I see this play finally onstage, my story being told, I’ll start feeling a bit better.”