Theatre in Review: If I Forget (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Jeremy Shamos, Kate Walsh, Maria Dizzia. Photo: Joan Marcus

In If I Forget, a family battle is fought on both personal and political fronts. Lou Fischer is long retired and, as his loved ones gather for his seventy-fifth birthday in July 2000, the disposition of the building that once housed the clan's long-closed Washington, D.C., clothing store is on everyone's minds. For years, Lou has rented the place to a Guatemalan clan who operate a dollar store; Sharon, Lou's daughter, has befriended the tenants and thinks the status quo should continue. Holly, another daughter, is scandalized at the low rent being paid, especially since the neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying; she wants the place for herself, to launch her budding interior design business. Both sisters angle for the support of Michael, their brother, an academic who lives in New York.

Michael, however, has troubles of his own, about which another, deeper conflict is brewing: He is about to publish a book, a polemic provocatively titled Forgetting the Holocaust, about "the relationship between American Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust, how that relationship works," adding, "Israel and the right-wing allies of Israel in this country, in the United States, they use the Holocaust, the memory of the Holocaust, to get American Jews to support certain kinds of policy prerogatives in the Middle East." This is, to say the least, a conversation starter among the members of this Jewish clan. Lou, a World War II veteran who was given the manuscript months earlier by Michael, has remained eerily silent on the topic. But Sharon, who, unlike her siblings, practices her religion, has plenty to say, none of it good, about Michael's perceived treachery.

Both of these questions gain added urgency when Lou has a debilitating stroke and money must be found for around-the-clock care. By now, Michael's career is in free fall -- he was denied tenure, thanks to the controversy surrounding the book -- and he and his wife, Ellen, are further burdened by ongoing worries about their emotionally unstable daughter, who, on a trip to Israel, began having visions in which God spoke to her; she is now a psychiatric outpatient. Michael pushes for the sale of the building -- the only legacy that binds them -- insisting that the proceeds will fund Lou's care, while not incidentally getting him and Ellen out of debt. Holly insists that she and her husband, Howard, can fund Lou's care by paying market-rate rent for her new business -- but she has a big surprise coming about the state of her family's finances. And Sharon, now openly hostile to Michael, thanks to the book, insists that the current tenants be allowed to stay -- for selfish, and potentially explosive, reasons of her own.

By welding these two conflicts together, the playwright, Steven Levenson (already represented this season by the poignant book for the musical Dear Evan Hansen), forges powerful arguments about the decline of Jewish liberalism across the twentieth century. It's family lore that Lou, who took over the store from his wife's family, served customers of all races at a time when Washington was thoroughly segregated, but it's also true that he shut it down after the riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King, even though the store was spared destruction. ("By the time they got to us, they were worn out, I guess. Stokely Carmichael had already gone to sleep maybe," he notes sardonically.) Michael, powerfully invoking a tradition ranging from Emma Goldman to the Freedom Riders, bitterly notes that with assimilation has come a kind of moral sclerosis: "We're just rah-rah-rahing alongside everybody else, the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Donald Rumsfelds of the world. Alan Greenspan -- that's what's left. That's our inheritance. A hundred years ago, we had Albert Einstein. We had Emma Goldman. Hannah Arendt. Walter Benjamin. Now, what do we have? William Kristol? Alan Dershowitz? That's what remains of the great Jewish radical intellectual tradition? O.J.'s defense attorney?" At the same time, Lou, who, as a soldier, was present for the liberation of Dachau, counters Michael's argument with a stunning account of the starved bodies, the appalling stench, the sheer absence of humanity. "For you, history is an abstraction," he says "But for us, the ones who survived this century, this long, long century...there are no abstractions anymore."

There are no easy answers in Levenson's elegantly constructed, wide-ranging, often scaldingly articulate drama, which features seamless ensemble work under the supremely assured direction of Daniel Sullivan. Seizing the opportunity, Jeremy Shamos gives what is arguably his finest performance to date as Michael, whose deeply held beliefs cost him so dearly, whether raging against the idea of Jewish religious revival, pointedly informing Holly that "the Zionists hated the rabbis more than the communists did," or noting bitterly that "the Anti-Defamation League has nothing better to do apparently than turn me into their cause of the month, the self-hating Jewish Studies professor/Hitler apologist who wants to wipe Israel off the map." Maria Dizzia makes a powerful, yet oddly vulnerable, antagonist as Sharon, who, facing forty without a family of her own, increasingly falls back on family and religious tradition -- often using them to mask her most self-interested decisions. As the wealthy, proudly superficial Holly, Kate Walsh rams home her zingers with brio, whether bullying her rebellions son, Joey (amusingly played by Seth Steinberg), or cracking wise about her daughter, a drama student at NYU. ("What's not to like? They play games. They sing songs. They cry. We're paying forty thousand dollars a year for Montessori school.") Larry Bryggman offers a stunning reading of Lou's Dachau speech in the first act and offers a harrowing portrait of physical decline in the second. There's also excellent work from Tasha Lawrence as Ellen, clinging pitifully to the hope that her (and Michael's) daughter can be cured of her mental illness, and Gary Wilmes as Howard, who harbors a devastating secret.

Derek McLane has supplied a two-level set, with turntable, allowing the family drama to play out across several rooms, accompanied by Kenneth Posner's meticulous, understated lighting. Jess Goldstein's costumes are cannily suited to each character; they are especially helpful in delineating the different life paths followed by Michael, Sharon, and Holly. Dan Moses Schreier has provided both sound effects (including a number of time frame-setting television broadcasts) and melancholy incidental music that is well suited to the production.

This remarkably rich piece ends on a non-naturalistic note, suggesting the visions experienced by Michael and Ellen's daughter. It's a powerful evocation of the centuries of events that have shaped Jewish culture and which continue to roil the lives of Levenson's characters. History is a tricky thing in If I Forget -- both a sustaining force and a straitjacket. Ignore it at your peril. -- David Barbour