King of the Jews – A Moral Conundrum

This drama about the Holocaust commands us to ponder a disconcerting moral dilemma. It was too much anxiety for the woman in the seat next to me. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, she fled at intermission.

The set of “the Astoria Café” fills the entire main stage space of the HERE Arts Center (a brilliant scenic design by Lauren Helpern). The café’s street door is in one corner, the bar in another, the bandstand in a third, and we, the audience (having entered through the “fourth wall” corner) sit authentically at café tables and banquettes all around the set.

The establishment’s regulars are happy to stay after curfew for a little more American jazz from a visiting Hungarian pianist (Jonathan Spivey), one more languid Yiddish ballad from the chanteuse (Rachel Botchan), and a few more whiz-bangs from the standup comic (David Deblinger). There’s a curfew because it’s 1939 in a Warsaw neighborhood where the café owner (Dave Shalansky) and everyone else is Jewish. Everyone, that is, except those they call “the conquerors,” who can be heard massing just outside.

Daniel Oreskes, Rachel Botchan and Dave Shalansky

In strolls one of them (Daniel Oreskes), who announces that the Jews will be left alone to manage their own community, but they must create a Jewish governing body—a Judenrat—and elect its leader. The café owner is the logical choice, but as soon as he’s elected and steps outside to introduce himself, the conquerors humiliate and shoot him.

So a doctor (Richard Topol), proud to call himself a healer, is elected by acclamation. But his ego will only grow larger; and like tyrants everywhere, power will corrupt him and turn him into a killer.The rest of the council members are the head waiter (John Little), a Bolshevik (JP Sarro), the cellist in the house band (Erica Spyres), and a pair of crotchety old rabbis (Allen Lewis Rickman and Robert Zuckerman) who’d rather needle each other than debate Talmud. While everyone is wavering pathetically between humor and terror, a boy (Wesley Tiso), fleeing from the conquerors, bursts in. The Judenrat decides to take a risk and hide him. He’s mute; but you know he’ll have much to say, later.

Robert Zukerman and Allen Lewis Rickman

The second act, set in 1941, begins with the council members dressed to the nines for a feast, relishing their high status in the ghetto. But the party’s over when their local conqueror tells them they have to draw up a list of names: Jews who’ll be sent east to work as farmers. If they don’t do it, or don’t pick enough people, the conquerors will choose. Oh, and the farms are very far away; the chosen ones will have to go by train . . . By sending away a few Jews, members of the Judenrat get to stay home. They get to live. This moral dilemma is stated several times, by almost everyone, in a variety of ways, but it all boils down to: Kill or Be Killed.

There were councils much like this in every ghetto and every camp. The playwright (Leslie Epstein) based the character of the doctor—the titular “King”—on a real man in the Lodz ghetto, who, like his counterpart here, came to enjoy wielding the power of life and death. In an interview, Epstein stated that, by adapting his novel into a play, “I want the many moral issues I present to hang over the audience when the play is over.” They will.

Audiences like to be scared; horror movies do big business. But this play may scare people in a different way, by forcing us to consider, if we were plunged into this crisis, what would we do? It’s also scary for being grounded in history. Everyone who’s likely to see King of the Jews knows what real horror was perpetrated in Europe at that time.

A play in which the audience knows something of importance that the characters do not know, is a farce. And like satire, a farce doesn’t have to be funny. But a farce that’s not funny makes us uncomfortable. (I, for one, can’t watch Othello without yelling: “Don’t listen to Iago!”)

Rachel Botchan, Richard Topol, and Welsey Tiso

The Holocaust has long been mined for drama. In recent years, it punctures the family in Leopoldstadt. And one can view the antisemitic lynch mob in the musical Parade as the Holocaust in miniature. (The woman who left at intermission, by the way, liked both of those shows.) But however moving, most dramas do not undermine one’s sense of well-being the way this one may. And the finale does not—because it cannot, really—resolve the characters’ or the audience’s moral dilemma.

By staging the production in the round, director Alexandra Aron powerfully heightens the verisimilitude. And the cast, knowing all eyes are upon them, near enough to touch, solidly inhabit their characters; no one phones it in. Shoutouts to Botchan, Sarro, Spivey, and Oreskes for extra depth.

Topol does a fine job as Dr. Gotterman, around whom much of the play revolves. But the role is strangely underwritten; his arc is presented but not fully set up or convincingly justified. With the Judenrat deadlocked over naming names, he writes the list himself, saying, “With a hundred [names], I save thousands.” But everyone, on stage and off, knows the roundup will never stop there.

Richard Topol

Botchan’s chanteuse offers the Judenrat a Masada-like resolution, with poison pills from the doctor’s medical bag. But are they really just sleeping pills? Half the cast seems to be waking up as the lights go down. While it makes a point (in a moral crisis, we can’t escape our responsibility to make life-or-death choices), the ambiguous finale lessens the impact of what the playwright has been trying to say.

While the audience is coming in, music director Matt Darriau (woodwinds) and Raphael D’Lugoff (piano) do justice to the era’s pop tunes in bluesy vintage style. The play itself opens when Spivey takes over the keyboard, Spyres (cello) and Sarro (tuba) enter in character and join the band—a nice directorial touch.

This play may not be everyone’s glass of tea. To fully appreciate what Epstein has wrought in King of the Jews, one must be prepared to be confronted with—and be willing to keep pondering, afterward—its moral conundrum.

Production Photos by Russ Rowland 

Opening: Allen Lewis Rickman Richard Topol and Jonathan Spivey               

King of the Jews by Leslie Epstein
Through November 18
HERE Arts Center
146 Sixth Ave./Dominick St. Tickets