What It Means to Never Forget

As a child growing up in the Bronx, Harold Lipshitz dreamed of becoming a big-band leader. After receiving his high school diploma, he decided to change his name.

“Swing and sway with Harold Lipshitz just didn’t parse,” Hal Linden explains, flashing a rueful smile.

A half-century later, Linden is again confronting issues of identity and assimilation in “The Gathering,” a play by Arje Shaw that explores the relationship of a Holocaust survivor to his son, grandson--and to his traumatic past. A critical and box office hit when it ran off-Broadway last year, it opened at the Wadsworth Theatre on Saturday night before a Broadway run.

“The Gathering” revolves around Linden’s character, Gabe, a Jew who fled Germany during Hitler’s Third Reich. The play is set in 1985, the year of Ronald Reagan’s controversial trip to Bitburg, where Nazi SS troops are buried. Stuart (Sam Guncler), Gabe’s son, is an ultra-assimilated presidential speech writer helping to orchestrate the visit. Gabe pleads with him to rethink his ways and to encourage Reagan to do likewise. He and his grandson, Michael (Adam Rose), fly to Bitburg, where he conducts the youngster’s bar mitzvah as a form of personal protest.

There they encounter a young German security guard (Coleman Zeigen) who raises the question of collective guilt. “Ten years in a thousand of Goethe, Beethoven, Heine, Rilke, Freud, Einstein, and all we’re remembered for is murder! Innocent generations contaminated for eternity.”

The role of Gabe, says Linden, is a natural fit. He was raised by an ardent Zionist who lost relatives to the Nazis. And the 69-year-old actor is national spokesman for the Jewish National Fund, a group dedicated to preserving and developing the land of Israel. In his mind, “The Gathering” is less about the Holocaust than about integrating it into one’s life. The challenge, Linden says, is keeping memory alive without becoming consumed.

“When does holding on become self-destructive?” asks the actor, who studied acting after his return from the Korean War and made his Los Angeles theater debut in “Bells Are Ringing” in 1958. “Some Holocaust survivors, like some American blacks, have become professional victims. There is no ‘forgive and forget,’ of course. But when does it all stop?”

For the playwright, the project provided insight into a man he revered--and feared.

“I’d never thought about my father’s losses--I was too busy living my life,” says Shaw, 59. “He was a quiet man with impulsive rage. I called him the John Wayne of Poland.”

Shaw wrote “The Gathering” during his off hours, relying on his day job as executive director of a Jewish community center in central New Jersey to pay the bills. His father, like Linden’s character, is named Gabe--a man who fled Nazi-controlled Poland, where his mother and sister later perished. For Shaw, “The Gathering” was not only a creative outlet but literary psychotherapy.

“In my 40s, I was unhappy with myself, unable to deal with criticism or stress, convinced that I’d inherited my father’s craziness,” he says. “Writing this play helped me work out these issues and made me a more compassionate person.”

When “The Gathering” premiered in May at Manhattan’s Playhouse 91, home of the Jewish Repertory Theatre, the three-week run was extended through mid-October. “A thoughtful and provocative new play filled with humor and warmth,” said the New York Times. “Worthy, engaging and potent theater.”

Theodore Bikel played the lead during the New York engagement. Touring as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” precluded his staying on.

“Theo, who escaped from Austria during the war, dug deep,” Shaw says. “He was the embodiment of the burden, giving expression to what he’d lived. As an American Jew, Hal gives the dialogue a more external spin. But, as a musician--a talented clarinetist who still performs publicly--he makes my words sing.”

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Shaw always identified as a “displaced person,” spending much of his life in search of himself.

Born in the Soviet city of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1941, he battled starvation as a child. After the war, his family spent three years in a German refugee center before heading for New York’s Lower East Side in 1949. The Szaijbowicz family lived in an $18-a-month, sixth-floor walk-up, sharing a bathroom with four other families. Tired of spelling their surname, they eventually became the Shaws.

Shaw met his wife, Esther, at Brooklyn College and they married in 1965. Both worked in Jewish community organizations before buying a kosher catering business. That purchase became inspiration for Shaw’s first play, “A Catered Affair” (1986). Gussie, a Jewish caterer, falls in love with an Italian headwaiter--and both of them are married. Told from a woman’s perspective, it’s about surviving in a man’s world.

The author sent a scene to Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater School, where he had enrolled in a playwriting class. He then mailed a draft to Broadway and film producer George W. George (“Any Wednesday,” “My Dinner With Andre”), with whom he met weekly over the next five years. The play, which was scheduled to run two weeks at off-Broadway’s Madison Avenue Theater Company, ended up with a six-week run.

The seeds of “The Gathering” can be found in “Catered Affair”--specifically, scenes in which Gussie talks to her father at his grave. Shaw started thinking about what he’d say to Gabe, now 83 and living in Florida with Arje’s 77-year-old mother, Bina. His next undertaking, the writer resolved, would be a play about fathers and sons. “The Gathering” was originally called “Boychik,” an endearing Yiddish term for “young boy.”

To broaden the appeal, Shaw came up with the idea of Bitburg, a political event in which past and present clashed. No matter that the president tacked on a visit to Bergen-Belsen, site of a Nazi concentration camp, says Linden, the trip was a major gaffe.

For 15 years, Shaw would write from 4 to 7 each morning--picking up again at night. On weekends and Jewish holidays, he’d put in 10- to 14-hour sessions. Sitting at the dining room table, he’d scribble down dialogue. To supplement his own experience, he spoke with survivors and Germans, read Nobel winner Elie Wiesel’s works and histories of World War II. He also perused Holocaust-related projects, such as Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker” and the Peter Weiss play “The Investigation.”

“For the first couple of years, it was wild,” he says. “I’d hear voices in the middle of the night and spouted dialogue on my therapist’s couch. I couldn’t start writing without going to pieces. Most authors try to write above the neck, I write from the heart--to a fault.”

“The Gathering” was first showcased at the John Houseman Studio Theater in November 1997. Joining forces with director Rebecca Taylor, Shaw mounted a fund-raising campaign. Unable to raise the $400,000 to $500,000 needed for a commercial off-Broadway production, they opted for the nonprofit Playhouse 91, where the show could be produced for about half the amount.

“Esther and I put in $75,000, taking a second mortgage on our house,” Shaw says. “I woke up a year ago in a pool of sweat, wondering what I was doing.”

On opening night, the real Gabe was in attendance. Someone asked what he thought of the play, Shaw recalls. “It’s very sad,” his father replied. And how did he feel about his son’s achievement? “I didn’t know he had it in him,” he allowed.

“I don’t know if he identified,” Shaw acknowledges. “I do know he was proud. Though he still hasn’t opened up, I see the love in his eyes. I can’t give him back his family, just as he can’t give me back my childhood. But it’s a matter of moving on.”

Unable to line up another house when the Jewish Repertory Theatre season began, “The Gathering” headed to Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse. The 1,100-seat venue was packed for three weeks--with an ethnically diverse audience. Producers Martin Markinson (“Torch Song Trilogy”) and Lawrence Toppall (“That’s Life”) came aboard in hopes of taking the play to Broadway.

A road tour--with stops in Wilmington, Del.; Los Angeles; West Palm Beach; and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.--was planned, during which the piece would be tightened. The play is the first at the Wadsworth since Markinson began managing the theater in July 1999.

That the original investors have recouped 90% of their money made it easier to raise the $1 million-plus needed for the upcoming production, according to Shaw.

“Is it Broadway material?” Linden asks. “It won’t be ‘Phantom of the Opera’ but, with its exploration of family dynamics, it does have mass appeal. The play started me thinking about my relationship with my son, Ian, who’s further to the right than I. Though I love him dearly, I, like Gabe, sometimes wonder what I have wrought.

“I’ve also started questioning just how Jewish my four children are. I’ve taken the kids to the Holocaust Museum in Israel. My son was bar-mitzvahed. But have I passed on to them what my father passed on to me?”

The conciliatory tone of the play, adds Taylor, strikes a chord--especially in times of international strife.

“ ‘The Gathering’ deals with healing between German and Jew, father and son,” the director says. “Though nothing is resolved, they’re taking the initial step.”

Shaw’s current project, “Magic Hands Freddy,” the story of two Italian brothers, deals with love and betrayal. Still, it’s also about fathers and sons and forgiveness. In August, the piece was performed at a workshop at Manhattan’s Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Writing has not only validated him as an artist but affirmed him as a person, Shaw says. But he’s holding on to his day job. Working in the real world feeds him creatively. And, besides, Esther would kill him if he stayed home.

“When I write, I think of myself as a writer, but it’s still a strange skin for me,” he says. “I’m the American dream--or the American nightmare. You’d have to ask my family.”

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“THE GATHERING,” Wadsworth Theatre, 11301 Wilshire Blvd., Brentwood. Dates: Wednesdays, 2 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Also Feb. 27-28, 8 p.m. Closes March 1. Prices: $25-$50. Phone: (800) 233-3123.