Hard to believe it’s 10 years ago this week when Bernard “Bernie” Madoff was convicted—in regard to his long-running Ponzi scheme—on 11 counts, including theft, money laundering, and perjury. Now the out-of-the-blue anniversary can start you remembering the days when the man was breaking news.
Flashing back on it, you may realize that what was seen of Madoff during the months between his December 11, 2008 arrest and his departure for North Carolina’s Butner Federal Correctional Center was almost always his entering and leaving various Manhattan buildings, including the one at 166 East 64th Street where Madoffs Bernie and Ruth had their penthouse.
Getting more than a glimpse of who Bernie was—how he spoke and behaved—wasn’t easy then. You had to use your imagination. In Imagining Madoff, Deb Margolin does the imagining for you—and with an impressive amount of persuasion. (N.B.: Richard Dreyfuss and Robert De Niro have both played Madoff in television movies.)
Putting her imagination into overdrive, Margolin sets the Ponzi prince inside a three-character drama. In it Madoff (Jeremiah Kissel) is either ranting to an unseen interviewer in a jail cell, visiting a Jewish poet-philosopher called Solomon Galkin (Gerry Bamman) or remaining quiet while a secretary (Jenny Allen), seated behind a raised table in front of a microphone, testifies at a hearing about her observations and her mounting guilt.
The secretary’s testimony is far ranging, but the meat of the play lies in the times when Madoff is pacing the cell—with its small, high windows spilling light. (Dara Wishingrad is the set designer). He rambles compulsively on, among other hot topics, the fate of the Jews. Just as often he sneeringly mocks anything on which his restless mind lands.
If he’s crossed the stage (lighting designer Michael O’Connor has much to do) to Galkin’s well-appointed study, he’s attempting to reconcile his flaws. At one distressed moment, he even considers spilling his horrifying secrets to Galkin, a decent intellectual and, as it happens, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. With ugly irony Galkin would like—get this—to buy into Madoff much-coveted business schemes, Eventually he does.
The Madoff-Galkin scenes are thick with drama. Believe it or don’t, Margolin even manages to infuse the final one (in what is meant to be one long wee-hours session between friends) with enough pathos that a few glints of sympathy emerge for the eventual 150-year-sentence criminal. In a truly memorable sequence, the religious Galkin puts leather phylactery straps and boxes (tefillin) on Madoff in hopes of awaking his friend’s dormant spirituality. Madoff expresses torment as he undergoes the invasion but doesn’t analyze its origins
Since Margolin announces she’s only imagining Madoff, the play can be watched as no more than her fantasy. As such, she’s created a moving figure in Galkin and even more of a riveting tough in the focal Madoff. Dark-haired (which is at odds with the rich manipulator familiar from footage), quick to anger, bitter, vengeful, mouth quivering, hands and arms thrusting, fingers pointing, repeatedly hitching up his trousers, this Madoff is forever on the move, forever driven.
Playing him—with only hints of the tics for which Madoff was known—Kissel is phenomenal. Throughout, as he melds all the above traits into a frightening, sorrowful winner-loser. As he grabbed the play tenaciously, I wondered, Where has this actor been all my theater-going life? He’s been building an award-winning reputation in Boston, which goes some way toward explaining why New York has been robbed of his imposing presence.
Anyone telling me that Kissel’s performance—directed for all he’s worth by Jerry Heyman—isn’t one of the absolute best on a Manhattan stage right now will have an argument on his or her hands. Because his actor’s concentration is so fixed, it’s hard to stop watching him. That’s even in the few moments when Galkin has the floor.
Bamman does take the floor. Reading poetry or excerpts from the Midrash, he’s touching—and touching as well when Galkin is insisting to Madoff what an upright friend he’s been. Until, that is, the duped companion finds out otherwise. For Allen’s virtual in-one showcase, she’s properly pinched from fear, her brow painfully furrowed out of growing remorse.
As Imagining Madoff lurches by with its own tragic undercurrents, the thought may hit patrons that 10 years is a long while for the must-see New Light Theater Project property to materialize. And thereby hangs a tale that patrons may vaguely recall from headlines some time ago.
It so happens that Margolin has had to count on her imagination more than she originally reckoned. When she first wrote the play, the Galkin character was not only based on Elie Wiesel, who lost his money (not to mention $15 million belonging to the Elie Wiesel Foundation) to Madoff but was also called Elie Wiesel—surely a much-fictionalized Wiesel in the play’s imagined circumstances,
A premiere production was about to open in 2010 at Ari Roth’s D. C.-located Theater J, when Wiesel, who hadn’t been consulted, heard about the work and threatened to sue. So much for the entry but not for the debate about First Amendment rights that followed. That’s for another time, though.
What’s immediately cogent is that Margolin had to imagine the poet-writing Galkin so that her revised first-rate play did debut in 2011 with all the questions it raises but smartly doesn’t answer. And now it’s here, ripe and raw for the rest of our theatergoers’ imaginations.
