All About Jewish Theatre - 'King of the Jews' a morality play on Judenrat

Lisa Traiger has been an arts writer since 1985. Currently she contributes to The Washington Post Weekend section On Stage page. She was a freelance dance critic for The Washington Post Style section from 1997-2006. Her pieces on the cultural and performing arts appear regularly in the Washington Jewish Week and on DanceViewTimes.com. She has written for Washingtonian, Moment magazine, The Forward, Dance Magazine, Pointe, Stagebill, Sondheim Review, Asian Week, the Boston Jewish Advocate, the Atlanta Jewish Times, Washington City Paper and Washington Review. A first-place recipient of the 2007 Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association award for arts and entertainment writing, Traiger also received two Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Arts Criticism from the American Jewish Press Association. She earned an M.F.A. in choreogr! aphy from the University of Maryland, College Park and holds B.A.s in English and Dance. As a New York Times Fellow, Traiger participated in the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. A board member of the Dance Critics Association from 1991-93, she returned to the board from 2005 to 2008, and served as its co-president during the 2006-07 season. Traiger currently serves on the advisory board of the Dance Notation Bureau. e-mail lisatraiger@aol.com

Playwright and novelist Leslie Epstein is no stranger to controversy. Thirty years ago, his Holocaust novel, King of the Jews, one of the first fictionalized treatments of the Shoah, riled critics for its unflinching, caustic look at a subject deemed sacred, and off limits to second-guessing and novel writing.

It took Epstein, who was born into Hollywood royalty of sorts -- his father, Philip, and uncle, Julius, wrote Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Arsenic and Old Lace, among other illustrious screenplays -- nearly 30 years to turn his 1979 novel into a morality play that at its core captures the drama and life-or-death predicaments of the Holocaust.

The Olney Theatre Center's production of King of the Jews, onstage through April 12 in the intimate Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab, explores the dilemma the Nazis forced Jews to face by creating a Judenrat, the Nazi-designated Jewish officials in ghetto and concentration camps.

Basing him on the Lodz ghetto's elder, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who used his position to try to save Jewish lives, but also wielded calculated power within the ranks of his Jewish underlings, Epstein created Trumpelman, a ghetto leader with his own moral failings.

In designer Jon Savage's faded Astoria Cafe, director Cheryl Faraone deliberately intermingles 11 Jews who find themselves trapped when a volksdeutscher, an ethnic German living in Polish territory, informs them that a Judenrat must be created and the coincidence that they've all overstayed the curfew makes them its first members.

On stage, King of the Jews has been compacted, the playwright culling a few significant episodes from a sprawling novel. It follows the structure of classical dramatic unities by reining in all action to a single place: the shabby cafe on two distinct evenings -- one in the winter of 1939, the other in the summer of 1941.

The colorful characters aside from stalwart Trumpelman, played with great reserve by David Little, include preening Hungarian furrier Schpitalnick, an oft-mincing Timmy Ray James and the raven-haired temptress Madam Rievesaltes, played with elegance and pained resignation by Valerie Leonard.

As the sneering, slick Nazi administrator F.X. Wohltat, James Konicek does a brilliant job at finessing the icy stare, the pregnant pause and the knowing surprise that his administrative orders put this disparate group of Jews into such a frenzy.

A pair of bumbling rabbis, Norman Aronovic as Verble and Carter Jahncke as Martini, stretch into stereotype with their discursive and bumptious talmudic arguments, while David Elias plays Schotter as a third-rate political comic. The cast is rounded out by Delaney Williams as its overbearing owner Rievesaltes, Peter Schmitz, a head-in-the-clouds waiter, Philosoff, Harry Winter's cook Herman Gutfreind and Cherie Weinert as nervous cellist Dorka Kleinweiss.

The group's first order of business comes when a runaway, young Nisel Lipiczany (Justin Pereira), appears and must be hidden from the German troops. The back-and-forth about whether, when and how to hide or turn in the lad sets the tone.

By the second act, the Judenrat has clearly reaped benefit even in the ghetto. Most of the men no longer wear tattered and patched overcoats and mufflers, but instead have acquired silk suits and top hats, looking like so many Monopoly men. But true power remains out of their grasp as becomes clear in negotiating with the Nazi Wohltat. Howard Kurtz's period costumes, scruffy and worn in Act 1, refined and stylish in Act 2, along with wig designer Anne Nesmith's lustrous styles for the women and men, lend verisimilitude to the evening.

Epstein's dramatization meanders a bit in places, introducing us to the personalities who make up the 12-member cast; by the final scenario, the playwright returns to the tautness of his intent and the moral ambiguities that make King of the Jews a compelling night of the theater.
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King of the Jews is onstage through April 12 at Olney Theatre Center. Tickets, $26-$49, are available at 301-924-3400.
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