If I Forget, the provocative drama now in a West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theater, suffers from a split personality. The first act centers on Michael Fischer (Leo Marks), a professor of Jewish Studies who has written a book claiming that by continually harping on the Holocaust, the Jewish people have lost their values and identity.
Fischer, in defending his position to his family, names the 2000 book, “The Holocaust Industry,” by Norman G. Finkelstein as his main influence. Finkelstein, my research reveals, “was drummed out of academia for being critical of Zionism.” In a review, The Guardian newspaper said, “The book reads like a rant, with splenetic attacks on individuals, many of them survivors, and vast generalities about the whole of world Jewry.” It dismissed the author as “a self-hating Jew who has nothing but contempt for his own people.”
In If I Forget’s first act, Michael passionately expounds on his ideas at a gathering of the Fischer clan. Angry reactions from his relatives fail to make him rethink his position. He’s going to publish his book no matter what, even if it costs him a chance at tenure.
The back-and-forth arguments take place in a house in Washington, DC against the historical backdrop of the failure of the Camp David Summit, which triggered the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The stakes are high all around, then, making for fiery, meaningful (and oft-times funny) verbal exchanges.
In Act Two, almost everything that has gone before is pretty much forgotten, and the play descends into a family squabble over a property issue. Should they sell the store that the Fischer patriarch (Matt Gottleib) founded many decades ago? Or should they simply allow it to be gentrified along with the rest of its neighborhood, which means the rent would have to be raised and the present tenant, a Guatemalan immigrant, driven out?
The conflict is real but a lot less important and complex than Act One’s conflict. And it’s also a dramatic letdown.
What keeps the play afloat is the sterling work by the cast, beginning with Sile Bermingham, who plays Michael’s Gentile wife. Samantha Klein plays Michael’s sister Sharon, a kindergarten teacher who fights valiantly to keep the family from selling out to the developers. Valerie Perri plays Holly, another of Michael’s sisters, a sharp-tongued, ballsy woman who makes the most of her many comic lines. Jerry Weil plays her shlubby, somewhat dim-witted husband.
The family’s third generation is represented by Jacob Zelonky as a sullen teenager and Caribay Franke as Abby Fischer, a 19-year-old who has a mental breakdown during a trip to Israel and flits silently and mutely through the family meetings, skipping around like a ghostly dancer. The magic realism isn’t enough to save the second act from its regrettable descent into banality.
