No individual in recent memory has invited that old expression “bad for the Jews” more than one Bernard L. Madoff, who just over a decade ago came to personify the crass greed and materialism ascribed to an entire religion and culture in the most virulent anti-Semitic tropes. So it was an inspired choice for playwright Deb Margolin, in Imagining Madoff, to position her title character in contrast to, and conversation with, a figure who embodies the long intellectual, spiritual and moral traditions that have always countered such bigotry.
Though Solomon Galkin, the Holocaust survivor and poet we meet in Madoff—now receiving an encore engagement at the Lion on Theatre Row, following an acclaimed run earlier this year at 59E59 Theaters—is a fictional character, he’s clearly based on the late Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who lost a fortune in both personal savings and funds for his humanitarian foundation after investing with Madoff. Under Jerry Heymann’s razor-sharp direction, the play traces an all-night meeting between the notorious Ponzi schemer and Solomon as Madoff recalls it, while addressing a biographer who’s arrived at his prison cell.
We never see or hear the latter visitor, which is just as well; as played by the excellent, Boston-based actor Jeremiah Kissel, Madoff seems intent on manipulating the narrative, regardless of what questions might be posed. Dressed in a natty suit (the one he wore that evening with Galkin, presumably) rather than jail garb, Kissel’s almost feral Madoff regards his interviewer, and the audience, with the arrogance and defiance of a man who still hasn’t realized the consequences of his actions. He also hasn’t lost his seductive gifts; when he talks about money—or more accurately, its power—his language is rhapsodic, almost hypnotic, forming a perverse, coarse poetry of its own. “The money moved fast, it was under the surface, hard to see, like salmon spawning,” Madoff remembers, of discovering his first love.
Margolin, who is also an actor, shifts between these monologues and the encounter with Galkin, whom Madoff calls “Sol”—approaching the accomplished man with the kind of disarming intimacy only the best salesmen can manage, though the two have actually just met, at a benefit for the synagogue where Galkin is treasurer. For all his hard-earned wisdom, Galkin—superbly played by Gerry Bamman, who captures both the character’s dignity and the ravages that age and experience have borne down on him—is charmed, even tickled. But the closer he comes to falling under Madoff’s spell, the more uncomfortable the latter becomes.
Margolin’s master stroke, in fact, is to not portray Madoff as a simple sociopath. This man who has amassed supreme wealth and stature by deceiving others seems to recognize in Galkin a better person than himself. Sitting in the poet’s book-lined study, with its mahogany interior—Madoff perceives wood as inherently masculine, in contrast to the flowers his wife favors, to his irritation—Madoff may not be fully or consciously aware of the starkness of his own soul, suggested by the nearly bare prison space sitting next to it in Brian Dudkiewicz’s set. But as he fails to understand the meaning of the one poem by Galkin that he knows, or to comprehend his host’s humility, or his passion for baseball and the Talmud, some combination of fascination and envy and guilt appears to gnaw at the criminal mastermind.
There is a female character in Imagining Madoff as well, referred to simply as “Secretary,” who has been Madoff’s employee for a decade. Speaking under interrogation after her boss has been captured—again, we don’t hear the questions, but can surmise—the woman is given a shaken, sometimes frantic air by Jenny Allen as she professes ignorance, shock and remorse. She also reveals a few of Madoff’s quirks, several of which point to a vile, casual misogyny. And the play features a fourth voice, of a sort, in the Judaic quotations that Margolin incorporates beautifully into the text, in several cases recited by Galkin, in his own after-the-fact reflections on Madoff’s betrayal.
“Hillel used to say, ‘If I am not of myself, who will be for me? But if I care only for myself, what am I?'” Galkin notes, from his study. Eleven years after Madoff’s crimes were finally uncovered, those questions resonate no less keenly.
