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The Action Against Sol Schumann

Reviewed By Irene Backalenick

Theater: 14th Street Y
Location: 344 E. 14 St., NYC
Starts: June 16, 2004
Ends: July 11, 2004
Presented by: Hypothetical Theatre Company

Jeffrey Sweet is a highly skilled playwright. In "The Action Against Sol Schumann," his new play at the 14th Street Y, his characters play out their private dramas against a backdrop of political and social events. These vibrant characters never get lost in the rich and detailed tapestry. It is the world seen through a microscope, through the members of one family.

"Sol Schumann," like so many Holocaust plays of this era, deals with Holocaust history as it affects the next generation. Sol, a quiet, deeply observant Jew, is honored by his sons, his community, and his synagogue. One son is a human rights activist who reacts strongly to anti-Semitic practices, past and present, while the other has become assimilated and removed from the fray.

But when the Schumanns are suddenly hit with accusations against the father, the family dynamics change radically. Sol, it turns out, had been a capo in a German labor camp. As facts and alleged facts surface, the family is torn apart. Is Sol a decent man who was forced to do the Germans' bidding? Or did he actually turn on his fellow Jews with unnecessary brutality?

Sweet creates a series of short, staccato scenes, which comes off in cinematic style and gives the sense of news broadcasts. His dialogue is sharp, searing, well suited to the cinematic style. It is no surprise that the playwright created the piece originally as a screenplay. The story is loosely based on the real-life story of Jacob Tannenbaum, a Brooklyn resident whose war-crimes trial in 1985 was widely publicized.

Amy Feinberg directs the piece and her 11-member cast imaginatively, mixing a choral reading style with hard-hitting individual scenes. Initially, the play is a confusing jumble of mixed events, like jigsaw pieces scattered across the table. But gradually the puzzle comes together, turning "The Action Against Sol Schumann" into compelling drama.

+++++++++++++

News from AmericanTheater Web

Private Tragedies Against the History of the Reagan Era
'The Action Against Sol Schumann', 'The Straits'
6/24/2004

How interesting, that, just as the media and parts of the nation have finished mourning the passing of President Ronald Reagan, two dramas should take to the stage opening within days of one another. Last Saturday, it was Jeffrey Sweet's The Action Against Sol Schumann, which takes place in 1985 just as Reagan visits the cemetery in Bitberg, Germany where Nazi soldiers are buried. Last night, Gregory Burke's The Straits, set against the Falklands War of 1982. Neither of the plays addresses the historical events directly; rather the pieces use them as backdrops for haunting and powerful tragedy on a private level.

In "Action" the focus is on the Schumann family. Sol, the clan's widowed patriarch and a Holocaust survivor, has settled into a quiet life in Brooklyn, where daily visits to the synagogue and his son Aaron's unmarried status are of greatest concern. Aaron's younger brother, Michael, also doesn't have much time for world events. Aaron, though, rails and protests against Reagan's planned trip. When he's interviewed by Diane, a reporter working on a story about how the Jewish community is responding to the news, it becomes quite clear that Aaron has little patience for human frailty. This trait will prove to be his fatal flaw, as simultaneously it comes to light that his father served as a kappo in the concentration camp some forty years prior.

Sweet's play unfolds much like a Greek tragedy even before it exposes Aaron's flaw and the events that will lead to his downfall. On Mark Symczak's multi-leveled set that seems to be made of triangles as if the Star of David itself has been split in two, the actors announce the time and locations of scenes and then, sit and watch each one unfold. It's interesting how this choice makes even the smallest private decision seem to be a public act with an effect on the community. Randy Glickman's lighting creates a careful balance as it draws one's eye to those acting and those observing throughout.

At the play's center, one finds Douglas Dickerman's graceful portrayal of the hotheaded Aaron. Dickerman finds nuance and even bewilderment in the character, even as he tries to grapple with the truth that he learns during the course of the play and attempts to fit the duality of his father's character into a compartment that will allow him to move forward.

Director Amy Feinberg, who keeps the production moving fluidly and quickly (until its last 10 minutes or so when the pacing slows too much), has chosen some terrific actresses to surround Dickerman. Susan O'Connor plays Leah Abelson, whom Aaron has met in a support group for children of Holocaust survivors and the attorney whom the family hires to defend Sol against potential deportation. She brings a charming vulnerability to a character that might, in other hands, be played as flinty. Catherine Lynn Dowling, as the reporter, nicely blends no-nonsense inquisitiveness with genuinely humane empathy. Tandy Cronyn appears briefly as a woman who might be able to help exonerate Sol, but ultimately chooses not to. Without becoming overly grandiose, Cronyn delivers the necessary warnings about compassion and understanding to Aaron with subtle grace and power.

As the principal men Aaron's life, Nathan M. White acts as the kind, levelheaded counterpart to Dickerman's firebrand. Herbert Rubens finds subtle level of shadings in the play's title character (watch how his eyes shift, squint and obfuscate during the scene in which Sol is questioned by a government official).

Sweet's drama, with its easy dialogue and uncanny specificity, might almost seem as if it were made of lighter stuff than it is, even as it its enormously pungent tale unfolds. In actuality, one finds at its core, a question that could well be asked of many people today, and even of Reagan himself: do we judge an individual's character and morality based on the sum of their actions or must we look at each choice singly?

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June 30, 2004
THEATER REVIEW | 'THE ACTION AGAINST SOL SCHUMANN'

A Holocaust Survivor With an Ambiguous Past
By D. J. R. BRUCKNER

Moral judgment becomes such a dangerous game in "The Action Against Sol Schumann" by Jeffrey Sweet that the play is a profoundly unsettling experience. This comes as a surprise, since Mr. Sweet's story is closely modeled on the federal government's internationally reported move in 1987 to deport Jacob Tannenbaum, a Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn, after it was discovered that he had been a kapo, or supervisor, in a Nazi camp, where he brutalized Jewish prisoners.

It was one thing to hear the arguments about the issues in that case, but it is quite another to be drawn into the personal agonies of a deeply religious old man, his two sons, their families and friends and the old man's accusers, as these people are vividly created by an admirably disciplined acting ensemble.

Most of the characters here end up crippled by discoveries about themselves that they cannot avoid, or endure. The old man has obliterated from his mind what he did. One inflexibly idealistic son lives to correct wrongs until his father's past catches up. An indifferent son has shed his Jewish identity only to find it rebounding in the form of disgrace. The rabbi and his congregation clutching their Torah banish the old man from their midst. The old man's accuser, another survivor, is driven mad by his lust for vengeance.

A defender, a former prisoner in the camp, argues that the old kapo saved many lives there, but she believes that his brutality is explained by a transformation of his personality by his own suffering at the hands of his Nazi captors.

In 90 minutes of accusation and argument, these people shed all certainties and seem lost to themselves, leaving the audience with reason to wonder what "survivor" can possibly mean. In dramatic terms, the final crisis of the play is botched. But that hardly matters; the great emotional and intellectual journey we have made almost makes the stage itself disappear from memory.