Albany Times Union

'Imagining Madoff' classic Stageworks

By Michael Eck Special To The Times Union
Monday, July 26, 2010

HUDSON -- Stageworks/Hudson has done it again.

The troupe's artistic director, Laura Margolis, has a long track record of finding exciting new plays and giving them strong, even-handed direction.

With "Imagining Madoff," she has another hit on her hands.

Playwright Deborah Margolin actually came to the attention of Stageworks through the company's annual "Play by Play" festival of short works. She penned "This Is What I Wanted" for last season's batch of one-acts.

But "Madoff" has brought both Margolin and Margolis more attention than they bargained for -- as a recent New York Times story discussed a controversy around the playwright's original concept of using Elie Weisel as a character in the play.

That the famous writer is not in the work now doesn't hinder the property one bit.

The title suggests what Margolin is up to here as she conjures a fantasia about the Ponzi schemer, Madoff. There are only three characters in the play, Madoff, his secretary and a noted poet and synagogue trustee named Solomon Galkin.

The latter is one of the many Madoff bilked.

Because it's a fantasia, Margolin is free to fiddle with the facts to tell the story she wants to tell, and she tells it beautifully. Each of the characters exist within their own bubble, but are allowed on occasion to interact as well.

The Secretary (Stageworks' vet Robin Leslie Brown) is bearing witness at Madoff's trial. The writer (Howard Green) is musing in his office, where he also meets Madoff (the fantastic Mark Margolis, who is not related to the director). And Madoff is talking with a journalist in his jail cell.

Margolin's dialogue is wonderful, and Margolis' cast makes it sing.

There are surprisingly few monologues, as the actors are addressing others rather than simply speaking their minds. But the structure feels electric and highly theatrical.

John Pollard's thrilling set, which reaches deep into the bowels of the building, seems to set the story in the present and in the biblical past all at once.

Andi Lyons' lights are simple and bright, like an interrogation.

And Jeffrey Lependorf's spartan sound design makes itself feel present when needed.

Again, Margolis' cast is excellent, with all three players offering top notch turns.

At Sunday's matinee a few lines were stepped on, but the intensity never wavered, and each found the dark comedy in Margolin's lines, too.

"Imagining Madoff" bears all the earmarks of a classic Stageworks presentation. It addresses a hot-yet-difficult cultural topic. It stirs all kinds of pots, with Judaism, for example, being a strong subplot here. And it asks more questions than it answers in all the right ways.

It's too bad the troupe's first notice in the New York Times had to be about a minor controversy rather than Stageworks' long history of major work. Recommended.

Berkshire Bright Focus

IMAGINING MADOFF
by Deborah Margolin

Directed by Laura Margolis
Reviewed by J. Peter Bergman
07/25/10

"Hiding the cookies."

In a ninety minute drift-through of Bernie Madoff's mind as he sits alone in a maximum security prison holding cell, we learn as much about him as most people will ever come to know about the man who ran the world's most famous Ponzi scheme. His downstage cell is bordered on one side by the study of poet, philosopher and Holocaust survivor Solomon Galkin. Far upstage a woman, Madoff's secretary, sits in a witness box testifying before the Security Exchange Commission. Time passes irregularly in this play and our attention is directed in one direction or another, and sometimes in two at the same time.

Madoff speaks of his dreams, all erratically erotic, and his activities. He is in a confessional mood but he can never quite get around to the high low-points of his career. He talks a lot about his wife Ruthie and about his friendship with Galkin, but addressing the issues is just not his thing.

Galkin, loosely based on the playwright's original "real" character Elie Wiesel, is a fascinating composite. Wiesel threatened to sue a Washington DC company that had planned to present the play. He and his wife had heavy personal losses in the Ponzi scheme that Madoff perpetrated on his wealthy and influential friends as had Wiesel's charitable foundation which lost more than 15 million dollars. Combining this history with a few other people playwright Margolin has created a most interesting man, one whose faith in God and Madoff are almost identical.

Galkin is played here by Howard Green whose performance is most convincing. He tries to interest Madoff in traditional Judaism, he flirts with poetry and metaphor, he dangles honesty from the end of a stick like a carrot to attract a rabbit, but Madoff resists all attempts to bring him closer to the man who may be his biggest fan. Green is charming, tough and resilient and it is only in the final moments of the play when Madoff's intended confession fails him that his Galkin shows even a hint of bitterness at the betrayal he has suffered. He is good in his monologues but best in his scenes with Madoff.

Robin Leslie Brown nails the secretary whose loyalty to her employer now allows her to question her knowledge, her feelings and her implied collaboration. As she testifies, Brown becomes more and more torn apart until she seems ready to fail her boss, betray complicity and ultimately to become the next victim of the man for whom she worked. Watching Brown slowly break down the insides of the Secretary (she has no name) until they are more visible than her body is a wonderful thing. Some may act from the inside out, but this fusion of actress and character lets us watch the process of emotional harikari delivered with aplomb.

As Bernard Madoff, the theater has brought in the excellent Mark Margolis. He is so much the man of the hour that occasionally you have to erase all you know about the actual Madoff because Margolis's creation is all too real. He acts the man with an inner urgency. We know he wants to tell us something, and we hope it is the elusive honest tell-all that the tabloids would love to have. What emerges from his mind are foul dreams, lousy relationships, false friendships and not much else. In his final scene with Solomon Galkin, this faux-Madoff turns into the dishonest crook that we watched on our television screens, only seen in a more personal dialogue than was ever released to the general public. What Margolis also shows us is the charm and personality that were so clearly instrumental in convincing bright, honest people to turn over their financial affairs to this man.

Laura Margolis has done a beautiful job staging this play. The separate connections and their unions work admirably. Her actors have clearly been given the time and assisting eye needed to develop fully believable, well-rounded characters. Visually she has created a time/space warp that gives all three full-reign to appear at will in each other's special arenas without ever breaking with the basic reality of the world created by the playwright.

Margolis is aided by a fascinating receding tunnel set designed by John Pollard who is helped terrifically by lighting designer Andi Lyons. Whatever work that has been done in Hudson during the rehearsal period has been seamlessly incorporated into this final product.

One of the best one-act dramas of this season (and there are loads of them this summer), so far, "Imagining Madoff" is a must see for any true theater enthusiast or Madoff fan.

Tablet Magazine

Burned by Bernie

The controversial play offering an imagined conversation between Madoff and one of his marks may be obscene, but that's what makes it great

Review by Marissa Brostoff
July 28, 2010

Earlier this year, playwright Deborah Margolin sent Elie Wiesel the original version of a script fictionalizing Wiesel's real-life betrayal by Bernie Madoff; the renowned author wrote back threatening to take legal action against its production. The play, he wrote, was "defamatory" and "obscene." Margolin's revised version of Imagining Madoff, which opened last week in upstate New York, is now difficult to construe as defamatory: Wiesel is gone, replaced by a character who shares some of his defining traits but not his name. But if we take "obscene" to mean that which lies outside the moral boundaries Wiesel has spent his career policing, the play is still that—which is what makes it a great work of theater.

The main action of Imagining Madoff—playing at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, New York—takes place during a long, scotch-soaked, pre-recession evening in the study of Solomon Galkin, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and Jewish community leader who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a certain Nobel laureate. Madoff, as imagined by Margolin, manages the funds of the Manhattan synagogue where Galkin (Howard Green) is treasurer; now Galkin, dazzled with the results, has summoned the magician to his home, hoping Madoff will take on his personal investments as well. The men banter easily, and their business meeting becomes a rambling debate over money, morality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and sex, with Madoff playing the whip-smart cynic to Galkin's erudite moralist. What Galkin doesn't know is that, like the hapless mortals of religious allegory who try to out-reason the Devil (as in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov) or Death (as in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal), his interlocutor holds a stacked deck—and Galkin's fate—in his hands.

In Margolin's telling, Madoff (played wonderfully by Mark Margolis) may not literally be Satan, but like the devils of literature, he can be charming, sadistic, and profound at the same time. Sitting in his prison cell, telling his story to a biographer (the scene in Galkin's study is actually an extended flashback), he makes what may sound like a laughably outrageous claim: "I didn't really care that much about the money." But perhaps it's not so outrageous. Serial killers, we know from the movies, are motivated less by practicality than by perversity—even, like Hannibal Lecter, by refined aesthetics—so, why can't the same be true of serial extortionists? "There was the music of it," Madoff says wistfully. The dollars don't just flash before his eyes; he waltzes with them. Later, he remembers a dream in which his penis is a vagina and his vagina is a wallet. The play's third character, a former Madoff secretary whom we periodically see testifying before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, offers the deliciously creepy fact that in 10 years, she never saw her former boss get up to go to the bathroom.

Most devilishly of all, Madoff as portrayed by Margolin is a kind of unconscientious objector to the moral universe presided over by the god of Abraham, where piety and obedience are rewarded and hubris is shunned. Galkin, then, is his natural enemy: a man who has seen hell and, instead of capitulating to its amoral code, has embraced Torah, ethics, and the Jewish people. He also happens to be a bit of a sap. Prattling about God and Sandy Koufax in his plush study, he comes across as self-satisfied and somewhat soft in the head. Madoff repeatedly attempts to convince Galkin that the latter's beloved Talmudic riddles are not paths to higher wisdom but to complacency. Galkin will have none of it: For him, the very fact that a financial sorcerer is managing his synagogue's funds is evidence of divine favor. "A lot of people ask me: Who is this Madoff? How does he make these miracles with money?" he says. "And I tell them: No one knows! That's what makes it a miracle!"

Galkin, in short, is Madoff's perfect mark: His belief in providence and in the goodness of fellow Jews makes him easy to exploit, and that, in turn, means Madoff wins their philosophical debate. His ability to betray his own people reveals the limits of Galkin's moral imagination. "I wanted to rip up the picture he had of the world," Madoff tells us. "His picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral. I wanted to say, 'Wake up, asshole! Wake up!' It's a danger to the world, that picture, that idea of moral men. With that picture in your mind you'll be murdered in your sleep."

Margolin's most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin's credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe. "Wouldn't you, wouldn't any man, still follow the leader blindly without knowing where he was going?" Madoff demands. Galkin will not entertain the possibility that despite his hard-won moral insights, he too is capable of "just following orders"; Madoff, meanwhile, never seems to consider that such a consummately human failing deserves sympathy rather than contempt.

In the end, the only character willing to consider the possibility that she has erred is the one without a bone to pick about the essential moral character of the world. "I never asked many questions," Madoff's secretary tells the SEC guiltily at the beginning of the play. By its end, she has charged herself more harshly than a judge, earthly or celestial, ever would. "I committed a crime," she says, "and I didn't even know it."

Register Star

IMAGINING MADOFF

Stageworks/Hudson
By Charles Kondek

Obie Award-winning playwright Deborah Margolin, much like her searing new play, "Imagining Madoff," is a force to be reckoned with. She is a brutally honest writer, cutting quickly, expertly, cleanly to the core of a character. It is also lean writing; nothing fussy, and her language often borders on the poetic.

The premiere of "Imagining Madoff "is being given an impeccable production by Stageworks/Hudson, directed by its artistic director, Laura Margolis. Another force! As usual her work can not be faulted. Margolis has an unerring eye for detail, an astute sense of the theatrical, and an uncanny ability to guide actors through the thorny paths of their craft, arriving at a place they could probably not have gotten to alone. Note the staggering performance of Mark Margolis (no relation) as the swaggering, unrepentant Madoff.

Yes, the Madoff of the title is the Bernard Madoff, destroyer of fortunes, the investment banker and the recent perpetrator of perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme, dollar for dollar, in the history of surreptitious finance. However, the play is only peripherally about the making/losing of money, and greed. It's more importantly about guilt, culpability, faith, and the comfort and security of religious belief, as well as blame, honesty, morality, and the redemptive power and solace of confession. Weighty themes which Margolin balances with considerable ease and dexterity.

The play begins in a maximum security prison where Madoff addresses a biographer to set the record straight. (The clanging here of the opening and closing cell doors by sound designer/composer Jeffery Lependorf is chilling.) The action quickly and fluidly moves to the recent past, a trial at the Securities Exchange Commission where Madoff's secretary (the competent actress, Robin Leslie Brown) gives testimony. The action then moves to the more distant past where Madoff is in serious debate about retribution and God's purpose with a fictitious poet and devout Jew, Solomon Galkin, sensitively played by Howard Green. The play alternates between these three locales, but it is the dialogue between the two men, one a real life figure, the other the playwright's creation that forms the backbone of the work. It is clever dramaturgy, expertly realized. Galkin sums up the discussion by saying, "I am a Jew, and Jews only ask questions; they don't provide answers."

See no other play this season if you wish, but "Imagining Madoff" is one you must see. It is by far the best theatre around, a gripping bravura effort and an experience that will stay with you a long time. At the Max and Lillian Katzman theater at 41 Cross Street, Hudson, until August 7. For tickets: 518-822-9667.

Jewish Forward

Reproducing Madoff

A Triumphant Play About Duality and Betrayal

By Laurence Klavan
Published August 04, 2010

When the Bernard Madoff scandal broke in 2008, some Jews feared a rise in anti-Semitism, predicting that age-old stereotypes of the greedy Hebrew would be awakened and again perpetuated. Now, nearly two years later, despite a minor increase in typically anonymous, bigoted comments on websites and blogs, it remains mostly a Jewish obsession: How could he have done it to his own tribe?

Deborah Margolin takes this question further in her provocative and compelling new play, "Imagining Madoff," which ran from July 21 to August 7 at StageWorks/Hudson in upstate New York. In her carefully crafted script, Margolin concocts an encounter between Madoff and an Elie Wiesel-like client, a Holocaust survivor and acclaimed poet whose synagogue is the latest unwitting victim of the investor's Ponzi scheme. It is, in Margolin's eyes, the meeting of two abiding and opposing Jewish prototypes: the scholar and the street tough; philanthropist and ganef; those who respond to hardship by learning and giving, and those who bitterly take.

Madoff (Mark Margolis) is first seen in his jail cell, a brash and vengeful veteran of poverty and struggle who has become in his investment business a savvy, secret, almost silent thief who knows enough not to call attention to himself, to be just "another envelope at the bar mitzvah." Reluctantly revealing himself to an unseen book writer (an overly familiar device that is one of the play's few missteps), he tells of his evolving friendship with one of his most elegant and esteemed clients, poet Solomon Galkin (Howard Green).

In meticulously written and sometimes eye-opening scenes, the Madoff-Galkin alliance slowly becomes the attempted spiritual education (or even seduction) of one man by the other. Madoff, who professes to find religion "boring" and "depressing," is drawn in by the devout but undogmatic Galkin, a former concentration camp inmate who finds comfort in the open-ended and tough-minded questions of the Talmud. Speaking dialogue filled with startling and ambiguous imagery — often and daringly related to sex and gender — Madoff eventually allows himself to be taught to tie tefillin. He is physically aroused and repelled by the experience, which he compares to sexual bondage, and which ends with straps wrapped tenderly and excruciatingly around the middle finger he has so often shown to the world.

Madoff wishes to avoid a connection and confession to this good man, who, innocently believing him to be a "miracle worker" with money, yearns for him to handle his personal finances; Madoff's refusal to do so becomes perhaps his only unselfish act. Ultimately, he starts to see himself as a false and irresponsible prophet to his clients, like the God who told Abraham to kill Isaac in the Bible story that Galkin makes him ponder. Overwhelmed by guilt, Madoff is too ashamed to be saved by the poet, his better, shadow self.

Studded with dreams, parables, talmudic quotations and dirty jokes that reverberate with meaning, Margolin's mature and intriguing script is a far cry from the shallow re-creations of cable docudramas drawn from public records and overly concerned with real events. At StageWorks, it is well served by Laura Margolis's effective and unobtrusive direction, which highlights the fine work of Mark Margolis and Green, the first a thoughtful and tormented thug, the second an erudite yet unpretentious man of letters. John Pollard's set provides spare and sleek evocations of Madoff's cell, Galkin's office (filled with the sturdy wood that Madoff sees as representative of maleness), and the headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It is only in this last location that the play mildly falters, featuring the sworn testimony of Madoff's unnamed secretary. Whether she is there to provide exposition or to add the ego to Madoff's id and Galkin's superego, her scenes are comparatively under-realized. They are beautifully played by Robin Leslie Brown, and feature a final image of the secretary standing with Galkin at the far upstage end of StageWorks' deep space — as if receding, unperturbed, into the past or the unconscious — providing the production's most effective visual. But the episodes aren't adequately integrated with the rest of the play, which so impressively attempts to honor or merely understand the aspects of Galkin and Madoff in the mythic Jewish character.

Interestingly, the man who inspired Galkin — a character clearly admired by the author — objected to the portrayal, which used his real name in the original script. As reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, Elie Wiesel called the portrait "obscene" and "defamatory," and threatened to sue, causing Margolin to change her play and scuttle its first production at Washington, D.C.'s Theater J.

Whatever this incident reveals about the delicate egos of purported paragons or the timidity of modern playwrights and their theaters, the result was fortuitous; maybe Margolin should have changed Madoff's name, as well. Since it's a play about duality and betrayal, using characters renamed and unbeholden to their actual, demanding (and perhaps self-deluded) inspirations might have made the already eloquent "Imagining Madoff" an even greater triumph of the imagination.

Laurence Klavan is a playwright and novelist living in New York City. His graphic novels, "City of Spies" and "Brain Camp," both co-written by Susan Kim, are being published this year.

Jewish Forward

True Drama

In 2010, Smaller Theaters Showed the Way to the Real

By Laurence Klavan
Published December 22, 2010

Large theaters in 2010 seemed to mostly recycle earlier images of Jews, familiarly corrosive or sentimental ("Angels in America," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Collected Stories," even "The Merchant of Venice"). It was left to smaller theaters to take fresh approaches to modern Jewish life and recent history. David Greenspan portrayed hilarious and hair-raising marital discord in his superb one-man show, "The Myopia," from the Foundry Theatre; Deb Margolin made something fascinatingly eroticized and religious out of a front-page financial scandal in "Imagining Madoff" at StageWorks/Hudson; the resourceful Flux Theatre Ensemble re-imagined the Old Testament on a shoestring in "Jacob's House"; in "Lingua Franca" at Brits Off-Broadway, gifted veteran playwright Peter Nichols conjured a sexy German emigre clinging to her anti-Semitism while teaching English in post-World War II Italy; and Vern Thiessen tackled infrequently dramatized Soviet prejudice in his effective black comedy, "Lenin's Embalmers," produced by Ensemble Studio Theater.

Closing the curtain on the year were two more productions with ambitions greater than their modest budgets and short runs. "My Inner Sole," which played five performances at the Lion Theater on West 42nd St. recently, was a stage piece by a Czech-born visual artist, Zuzka Kurtz. Her work has focused on the experiences of her parents, who survived Auschwitz and then fled the Soviets in Prague before settling in Israel. Her three-foot-tall skeletons dressed in luxurious clothes (with shoes culled from friends and family) express for her the omnipresence of death amid privilege that has shaped and haunted her life. For the theater, Kurtz expanded on the idea with music, dance, and monologues.

The most effective part of the evening was the most prosaic: searing anecdotes of death camp horror effectively related by actress Cynthia Adler (as Kurtz); and, in a brief appearance, Kathryn Grody as a voluble aunt made a persuasive argument for Kurtz getting on with life and getting some pleasure out it. "Memories," she said, "are the lowest form of intelligence."

The dance interludes, performed by Pepper Fajans and choreographer Wendy Osserman, contained occasional visual eloquence: Osserman tried to fight free of a sheer, blood-colored linen, as if she were Kurtz, emotionally hobbled by the cruelty her parents faced; Fajans became sensually intertwined with many of the eighteen skeletons on view, as if he were embracing decomposition.

Kurtz deserves credit for trying to portray the plight of the survivor's child in a symbolic and non-traditional way, even if "My Inner Sole" was ultimately less a piece of theater than a private therapeutic effort, less an examination of an obsession with the Holocaust than a demonstration of it.

Characters are also hopelessly haunted by family misfortune in Tommy Smith's "The Wife" (which ran at the 50-seat Access Theater downtown), though the committed wrongs were current, local, and sometimes self-inflicted. In this engagingly grim play, the need for connection among characters of different cultures was catalyzed by a crisis in the life of a young Hasidic couple.

Living in an unnamed New York neighborhood, Jakob (Noel Joseph Allain) and Ruth (Caitlin McDonough-Thayer) have lost their son "before he could be named." Their grief propels them from their Haredi cocoon into the surrounding multi-cultural and hipster area from which they have been cloistered. Jakob begins a double life, rigidly religious on the surface, but engaging in sex with a boozy prostitute, Nance (Mary Jane Gibson), in private. Ruth secretly takes a job caring for the cat of an unstable graphic designer, also named Jake (Jacob H Knoll), in order to earn enough to leave the city and her husband.

Those they meet react to the couple's formal and foreign-seeming wardrobe, attitudes, and accents with everything from fascination to fetishizing to mockery, revealing a desperate need to crack open their clannish insularity and grow close to them. The designer Jake develops a dangerously delusional crush on Ruth; Nance draws the wife into her underworld of drinking and drugs. As each relationship revolves and evolves into others, the two Jakes end up in disastrous collisions with Nance's young daughter, Girly (Ayesha Ngaujah).

The idea of strangers from different cultures being connected by tragedy has recently become cliched through earnest movies like "Crash" and "Babel"; and maybe there should be a year-long moratorium on using child death as a cathartic dramatic device ("Rabbit Hole," "Mystic River"). Yet Smith's play offered no hopeful Hollywood endings: in it, mourning caused bad decision-making, intimacy led to catastrophe, and people only get close enough to hurt and even kill each other.

While his structure sometimes seemed schematic and his imagery first draft-ish and unprocessed, "The Wife" also had a raw energy that was engrossing, along with a yearning and disgusted sincerity that haunted even after the surprisingly surreal and (only marginally) hopeful final scene.

The production was also exemplary. Director May Adrales cleverly scattered the action and audience to different areas, immersing us in new worlds as the Hasidic couple was immersed; and all the actors created fine, fully-dimensional portraits. In maybe the most difficult role, Allain managed to be both menacing and pitiable using only the limited amount of expressed emotion his character allowed himself. He served as a symbol for all the doomed attempts at union that dotted this admirably unsentimental play.

While well-funded theaters in New York feature the arrival of angels and interracial handclasps, low-budget venues continue to portray an ethnic and religious world harsher, more real, and truly contemporary. Maybe traveling light and flying under the radar are the real ways to reach a future in the theater.

Laurence Klavan is a playwright and novelist living in New York City. His graphic novels, "City of Spies" and "Brain Camp," both co-written with Susan Kim, were published this year.