Backstage @ New Rep

Why it's Worth Spending a Little Time with Bernie Madoff

I was somewhat reluctant to spend an evening with the repellant Bernie Madoff. Perhaps I was suspicious of the playwright’s motives. How could one tolerate Madoff’s slimy company? What could the play be other than an effort to help me understand a person whose actions have put him at the outer edge of the circle of people whose actions I wish to make the effort to understand. But Deborah Margolin’s brilliant play is titled Imagining Madoff, not Understanding Madoff, and she imagines brilliantly.

Jeremiah Kissel’s Bernie Madoff is indeed reptilian and cruel, repellant but also dazzling, charismatic, funny. As he talks with his friend, the Jewish poet, Holocaust survivor and scholar, Solomon Galkin, we believe entirely in his ability to fascinate and charm this good man. As the play opens, Galkin sits in his study surrounded by books. (It’s worth a ticket and a trip to Watertown just to see the great Hokusai-like wave of books that sweeps from behind Galkin’s comfortable library chair, tumbling over his head and down the ceiling of the stage to the other end where Bernie sits in a prison, also constructed of books, but orderly, rigid, a cell with bars built from what appear to be leather-bound law books. (I must admit that the wave of books was distracting: like any worshipper of print I was worried by the numbers of books that were destroyed to construct the set and spent too much time myopically peering at spines and chapter headings.)

Bernie thinks back to an evening spent with Sol, perhaps the only person he feels any admiration for. He tells us that he resisted involving Sol in his Ponzi scheme, but the old man, intrigued by what he could do for his shul and for charity with so much money, keeps urging Bernie to take him on as a client. The conversation between the two men is wide-ranging, with the older man assuming an interest in moral questions and niceties which Bernie only pretends to share. Sol has the wisdom conferred by scholarship and horrific experience, but he also has a terrible naiveté which leads him to make dangerous assumptions about the snake of a man before him. Much whiskey is consumed. At one chilling moment the old man pulls out one of his greatest treasures, his tefillin, which he teaches a reluctant Bernie to wrap around his arm. Bernie can scarcely contain his instinct to recoil from such holiness.

Sol’s conversation fascinates us as well as it does Madoff, who seems to be looking back from a great distance at a religious and cultural identity which should have great meaning for him, but clearly does not.

Gaps in their conversation belong to Mr. Madoff’s secretary who seems to be answering questions from an investigator, explaining her long relationship with Madoff and the walls he created to distance her from the realities of his business. Despite their long association he is an enigma to this woman whose sense of guilt highlights his complete lack of it.

I was reminded of Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III, as a man who is evil but entirely human. I’m not sure what human instinct allows us to be fascinated by such villains, but fascinated and entertained we are. I would strongly recommend that you take this opportunity to imagine Bernie Madoff.

~ Johanna Ettin, with Shauna Shames, New Rep Reviewers