Sheltered at Jewish Rep

From Cocktails to Conscience

Review by Anthony Chase

Rebecca Elkin as Evelyn and Peter Horn as Leonard in Alix Sobler's play, "Sheltered" at Jewish Repertory Theatre

Sheltered, by Alix Sobler, appears at first to be a period comedy in the style of Noël Coward. The playwright lures us into the comfort of cocktails, witty repartee, and the promise of marital intrigue. Leonard and Evelyn Kirsch could be Charles and Ruth Condomine, preparing to host a séance in Blithe Spirit. We seem to be drifting through a 1930s comedy of manners in which the fiercest conflict might be a debutante jilting her fiancé or a fractious couple reconciling before dessert. But no. Sobler's play ventures into profoundly darker territory. It is 1939, the eve of annihilation.

Kristallnacht has already shattered the glass of Europe the previous November. The systematic mass murder of the Holocaust, or Shoah, will begin in 1941. Sobler sets her story in that suspended moment, that interregnum after the world should have known, but before it decided what it would do.

In the elegant Providence, Rhode Island, home of Evelyn and Leonard Kirsch, we see the American Jewish bourgeoisie at its polished apex, their moral anxieties just beneath the glimmering surface.

Don't get too cozy in this sophisticated comedy of manners. The tone is about to shift. Maria Pedro,Peter Horn,and Rebecca Elkin.

The production, now at the Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York, directed with sharp modulation by Kyle LoConti, understands the voluble seductions of style.

Rebecca Elkin's Evelyn is a perfect hostess, educated, kind, and effortlessly gracious. She has cooked nothing tonight; the Kirsches have "help." Kari Drozd's costumes give her the glamour of an MGM leading lady, and Mary Jakiel's coiffure design completes the portrait of privilege that cannot shield conscience. Indeed, Elkin makes clear that perfection may no longer be enough in an imperfect world. She finds steel beneath the MGM glamour, particularly when this perfect woman deploys a morally chosen lie. Her resolve must overcome the softness of her husband's heart.

Peter Horn's Leonard is her match: urbane, confident, with the clip and tilt of a man who knows, without thought or hesitation, which fork to use, and how much vermouth to add to a beaker of gin. His immaculate 1930s haircut -- short, tapered, combed smooth in that Clark Gable manner -- embodies an era of belief in control. We know this man, this style, when "Tennis anyone?" was the gesture of affluence and not yet the symbol of denial. Horn gives him backbone and just enough unspoken doubt. He allows Leonard to succumb to his wife's wisdom, finding strength within a weakness.

Maria Pedro and Adam Yellen as dysfunctionally married Roberta and Martin Bloom

These are deftly nuanced performances. Maria Pedro and Adam Yellen, as Roberta and Martin Bloom, provide the evening's startling paradox: their marital tragedy is the comic relief. Sobler writes them as people who wound one another with brilliance, the kind of couple who turn disappointment into theater. Pedro finds flashes of tormented sophistication in Roberta's bitterness, while Yellen's Martin -- self-loathing, ironic, calloused by assimilation -- wears his despair like a war medal. Their duels have an acid wit that tempts laughter before the deeper chill sets in, delivered with impeccable comic precision and angst. Ironically, when they exit, we will miss this odious couple.

The first act belongs to conversation -- the high-stakes gamesmanship of people whose social niceties are on the precipice, about to fall. The Kirsches need something from the Blooms. A plan is forming: a rescue, a moral test, an act that will define them. Sobler's writing slides from the brittle to the humane, and LoConti captures that quicksilver shift in tone. The audience is temporarily lulled by the champagne sparkle, but this amazing cast and polished production leave no doubt that the bubbles are going flat. Domestic squabbles and social anxieties are about to be revealed as the luxuries of the unburdened, those moments when your first world problems become insignificant.

By Act II, we are in Vienna, and everything elegant has turned sinister. Chris Cavanagh's set design transforms the atmosphere with precise disquiet, aided by a soundscape by Tom Makar that suggests menace just beyond the locked door: sirens, thunder. The Kirsches, now participants in the unthinkable, must select forty children to take back to America without their parents, fully aware that those they leave behind may die.

Enter tragedy; Gretchen Didio as Hani with Peter Horn and Rebecca Elkin as Evelyn and Leonard Kirsch.

The arrival of Gretchen Didio's Hani throws the Kirsches' moral debate off balance and brings the ethical terror into the room. She has decided to remove her son from consideration. She will not pass the beloved child into the arms of strangers. He will stay with his family in Vienna. Her composure disintegrates with shattering quiet when she is informed that her son had actually been among the children chosen. The play's charm has evolved entirely into conscience. Didio captures the moment with expert precision, but it will be up to Elkin to transform this twist into clear and illuminating drama, as she navigates what women can say when there are no men in the room.

Sheltered is rooted in a real mission: in 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus of Philadelphia traveled into Nazi-controlled Europe and rescued fifty Jewish children. Sobler uses that story not as history but as crucible. She invents her own characters, her own emotional topography, while retaining the historical magnitude, the terrifying specificity of choice.

And so Sobler's triumph is not historical reenactment. She has written a seductive play, one that invites laughter and then leaves us stricken by our ease. We forget ourselves, like mourners who giggle at a funeral, and then remember abruptly where we are. LoConti lets Sobler's sharp, fluent dialogue give the production its irresistible surface; and then lets her moral intelligence give it its weight.

The audience at the JCC may note the resonances with our own America, an age again measuring the price of silence and the definition of courage in the face of rising antisemitism, suspicion of immigrants, and a renewed admiration for wanton greed. At one moment, a character objects, "this is not Medieval Spain!" in the same tone we hear when people today say, "this isn't Nazi Germany!" At the same time, people of conscience in Minnesota have taken to the streets, and even given their lives to stand up for democracy and humanity. Sobler's play reminds us that comfort is sometimes a dangerous luxury, and that the question we think belongs to history is always being asked anew.

Performances continue in the Maxine and Robert Seller Theatre at the Jewish Community Center at 2640 N. Forest Road in Getzville, through March 1st. The running time is about two hours.

Phone:  716-306-3086

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