Willing to confront an audience with unashamed evil, Apple Tree Theatre has detonated a play called “Denial.” Testing our faith in freedom, Peter Sagal’s taut 1995 drama focuses on Abigail Gersten (musical comedy star Paula Scrofano), a crusading Jewish attorney and ACLU member. Gersten reluctantly decides to defend Bernard Cooper (Mervon Mehta), an engineering professor who lectures that 6 million Jews, as well as Gypsies, homosexuals, Johovah’s Witnesses and Communists, were not exterminated by the Nazis. (Cooper is based in part on Holocaust skeptic Arthur Butz, a Northwestern University engineering teacher.)
Accused of incitement to violence, Cooper has had his mailing lists confiscated by Adam Ryberg (Erik Lochtefeld), a zealous prosecutor who is, not incidentally, Jewish. To Gersten, who believes in the rule of law and inevitability of justice, this unpopular trial both tests and justifies the 1st Amendment, proving that what’s right is seldom what’s easy. To a venal self-promoter like Cooper, the “witch hunt” is free publicity to spew fascist revisionism. Ryberg, allied with Noah Gomrowitz (Mike Nussbaum), a Holocaust witness and moral eminence, loathes Cooper as an apologist for a “Fourth Reich” and the center of a criminal conspiracy.
Complicating a plot that refuses to succumb to easy extremes, Sagal introduces Nathan (played by Chicago theater treasure Nathan Davis), a second Holocaust victim. His startling testimony reveals the poisoned well from which Cooper draws his “denial.”
Momentous and spontaneous, Eileen Boevers’ staging gives equal emphasis to the emotional showdown and the ideological clashes. Though Scrofano sometimes substitutes exasperation for rage, her agonized attorney registers the cost of using a monster to test an ideal.
More proof of the banality of evil, Mehta’s seemingly innocuous, Bible-quoting Cooper exudes the affability of a willing martyr, then curdles into hate as he blames the victims. In another magnificent performance, Nussbaum brings depth and dignity to Noah, a role that treacherously shifts from accuser to survivor. And playing Cooper’s chosen enemy, Lochtefeld demonstrates the danger of reducing cold law to hot revenge. He proves there’s more than one “denial” at stake here.
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“Denial”
When: Through May 24
Where: Apple Tree Theatre, 595 Elm Place, Highland Park
Call: 847-432-4335
