THEATER REVIEW: THE ACCOMPLICES

While the Roosevelt administration and American Jewish establishment fiddled, Auschwitz's ovens burned

By Ed Rampell

Bernard Weinraub's The Accomplices, which scored a Drama Desk Award nomination for Best New Play in New York in 2007, was performed to sold-out audiences at L.A.’s Fountain Theatre last season and is now being reprised at the Odyssey Theatre.

This is a superb piece of political theater about the struggle to save European Jewry during WWII. It turns out that Adolph Hitler and Adolf Eichmann were not the only ones responsible for their extermination during the Holocaust. According to journalist-turned-playwright Bernard Weinraub, many Jews also perished during the "Final Solution" due to the insidious policies of the United States' Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, the British government and – most stomach-turningly of all -- establishment American Jews. While they fiddled, Auschwitz's ovens burned.

One of the most exciting things about theater and film is how they can dramatize actual figures and events, especially those long ago and far away. Weinraub and director Deborah LaVine artfully bring this real life drama alive, as Jewish activists join forces with a playwright to fight the power and anti-Semitism in the land of the free. Stellar Steven Schub is no schlub as Peter Bergson, the activist from what was then called Palestine, who takes on the kingpin of official American Jewry, Rabbi Stephen Wise (Malachi Throne plays the wise guy) and even Roosevelt (Time Winters), during the winter of European Jewry’s discontent and dismemberment.

Surprisingly, one of the heroes of the crusade to save Europe’s Jews from the gas chambers is that Hollywood Golden Age golden boy, Ben Hecht, who won the first original screenplay Oscar, for Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 Underworld, and was La-La-Land’s highest paid screenwriter. In addition to crime stories such as the latter and 1932’s Scarface the former Chicago newspaperman specialized in screwball comedies -- notably William Wellman’s 1937 Nothing Sacred starring Carole Lombard and The Front Page, including various adaptations, such as Howard Hawks’ 1940 His Girl Friday.

During the 1940s Hecht, the son of Jewish immigrants, turned his acid dipped pen, energies and pocketbook to shaming FDR and establishment Jews into rescuing European Jewry from Nazi genocide. As The Accomplices details. Hecht joined Bergson and Merlin (William Dennis Hurley), writing and co-presenting a 1943 memorial pageant entitled We Will Never Die at Madison Square Garden, starring Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni. It included a reading of Hecht’s harrowing Remember Us, which gave voice to the Shoah’s victims and is dramatized in The Accomplices. Actor Dennis Gersten, who is also (appropriately!) a playwright, portrays Hecht with great verve.

The Accomplices plays through June 14 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. (near Olympic). For more info: call 323-663-1525;or log onto www.FountainTheatre.com.

Editor's note: Although we were having technical difficulties with this article we went ahead and published it due to time constraints.