City Paper of Washington does a big piece on Theater J‘s decision to cancel the play "Imagining Madoff," by Deb Margolin, because it would offend Elie Wiesel, a personal friend of the theater’s artistic director. I get the legal/defamatory issues, but to me this is about privilege. The numbers in the Madoff case were huge, millions and millions, and the resulting work of art is not proletarian theater, it’s an examination of ethnic solidarity within a high American caste. And yes, in turn, Jewish institutions are part of that world. Remember that Wiesel made his reputation initially with a literary work, Night, but here he is the censor. I’m glad the work’s being produced in Hudson, New York, whose artistic director is Laura Margolis.
“A work of the imagination,” [Theater J’s artistic director Ari] Roth called it.
Wiesel, though, was in no mood for works of imagination. In a letter FedExed to the playwright, he called Imagining Madoff “obscene” and “defamatory” and promised that his lawyers would make sure it never reached the stage, the Washington Post reported last week. “Nothing of me is in your script,” Wiesel thundered…
As Margolin revised, Roth traded several communiqués with the Elie Wiesel Foundation. Back in March, he and Margolin had contacted the humanitarian organization to give them a heads-up about the play, with Margolin penning what Roth calls a “deeply reverential” letter….
But now, with Wiesel furious about the results, Roth was offering to share Margolin’s eventual draft with the foundation to show that it contained nothing legally actionable.
To Margolin, this sounded too much like giving Wiesel a veto..
So why did Roth decide to duck a fight this time? Interviews with Roth, members of Theater J’s governing council, and top JCC administrators suggest that he never even considered attempting to go forward with the original version once Wiesel raised objections. “Wiesel is part of the family,” he says, referring to Wiesel’s symbolic relationship with Jewish artists and the Jewish community. That could apply to Roth’s own family, too. His mother, who as a child was hidden from the Nazis during World War II, has been acquainted with Wiesel for half a century; he advises the Holocaust Education Foundation of Chicago, of which she is a founder. And they’re friends: Roth says Wiesel heard him sing Adon Olam in Chicago when he was 12.
“This play was designed to reconstruct something of Bernie Madoff’s motivations and confer some pathos on Elie Wisesel. But to him it represented—he felt the play was defaming,” says Roth. “That is not a fight we want to have—when you’re looking at that kind of traumatic reaction, that’s not a fight we would want to have.”
All the same, it’s not a fight they necessarily would have lost, either. In fact, Margolin had prepared for a bit of blowback. Some time before she wrote her letter to Wiesel, Margolin also asked a lawyer friend of hers to take a look at Imagining Madoff. In a memo, the New York attorney wrote that Theater J had the right to use Wiesel’s name and likeness in a work of art because he is a public figure. Whether the play was potentially defamatory was a trickier question. Lawrence B. Steinberg, a lawyer practicing entertainment litigation in Los Angeles, says that as long as Imagining Madoff was clearly labeled a work of fiction, a public figure like Wiesel would have a hard time in court. To establish defamation, he’d have to prove malice. But if Wiesel would have difficulty winning a suit, that wouldn’t stop him from bringing one. (After Margolin began revising her play, the JCC’s counsel looked at the proposed name changes and concluded the work would no longer be legally actionable.)
That wasn’t enough for Roth, who felt that the gray areas of the law could land him in court—a place he’d willingly go to defend some sorts of creative freedom, but not the right to offend Elie Wiesel.
h/t Janet McMahon
