Imagining Madoff

Let me confess that after a trying day I dozed occasionally during the early moments of this uninterrupted hour and forty-five minute play -- not to excuse my missing something but to possibly modify my impression that this drama never really discusses what Bernard Madoff’s crime actually was: a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Instead, it presents us with the playwright’s imagining what Madoff may have been thinking. Because much of what the play does discuss is a compelling presentation of Hebrew traditional ritual and religious thought, I suspect that Imagining Madoff will entertain audiences at Jewish community centers all over.

We begin with three separate characters facing front in a row: Madoff’s secretary seated behind a plain desk at stage left, Madoff shown only with a chair at center, and Madoff’s friend Solomon Galkin, a sweet, saintly old man identified in the program as “Holocaust survivor, poet, synagogue treasurer.” Stage right, in Daniel Kester’s smart design, is Galkin’s intricately and revealingly detailed study, loaded with books and comfortable furniture.

Initially, Madoff is a rather strutting, commanding but off-putting, unrepentant figure discussing his disdain for most people and institutions and beliefs. The program identifies Madoff as “billionaire financier, financial criminal,” and his location here as “Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.” Madoff is Jewish but not fondly so, and his trying to remember what the punch line is for the joke beginning “How many Jews does it take to plug in a light bulb?” is a stereotypical indication of disdain (like a “Polish joke”).

Stefan Cohen is made up to look older but doesn’t really resemble Madoff. Yet, though he plays Madoff without likable traits, his seemingly honest contempt for humane values seems to win a grudging sympathy from the audience.

Stephanie Sheak, identified as “A Secretary,” is in the “Securities and Exchange Commission courtroom,” but she sits behind a plain desk, facing the audience, and seems to be mostly agonizing on her own about her inability to understand what she saw going on in Madoff’s business. Sneak’s performance offers more impression than the script and does eventually win sympathy for her character’s self-questioning.

But most of the play is an increasingly sloshed, all-night argument between the old friends at Solomon Galkin’s house, which reaches a kind of climax during their discussion of the Old Testament’s account of Abraham being told to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Madoff is incensed at Solomon’s thought that we cannot comprehend the cruel command but ultimately must submit to the thought of an omnipotent and omniscient God whose rule is moral and ultimately rewarding.

In fact, Madoff is sorely tempted to actually tell his friend that he has betrayed him, after Galkin has referred to his dear friend’s kindness to him. He is stopped by Galkin’s insistence at interrupting and finishing his sermon on God’s goodness. And they part affectionately.

And there I realized that, if, indeed, Solomon Galkin is the playwright’s stand-in for Elie Weisel, who famously was Madoff’s friend and infamously was bilked out of money intended for retribution for Holocaust victims, then I am very glad that Weisel’s name was not used. Because Galkin is shown as fervently mouthing ancient beliefs, but he is no all-wise King Solomon.

There is a word, chochum, meaning “wise man,” which I have heard many Jews use, but never admiringly. It is usually a satirical, dismissive utterance meaning, “This fool is no wise man, though he thinks he is.”

And that was what this peculiarly involving, mostly uneventful play brought to mind as the two friends parted almost at the play’s end. Relieved that he has remained unexposed and held fast to his opposition to his old friend’s self-satisfied righteousness, Madoff asks him if he knows the answer to how many Jews it takes to install a light bulb, and Galkin says that it is an old joke with many answers, but that his own answer is “six million and one,” because even after the horrors of the Holocaust, we still follow the command and achieve God’s righteous will.

And touchingly though Steven Marsocci plays the old teacher [Rabbi means teacher], I had trouble avoiding Madoff’s sneer and the taunt, “chochum!” Remember the optimist in the roomful of horse manure who insisted, “There has to be a pony in here somewhere!”?