Retributionists stars Margarita Levieva with Cristin Milioti; Adam Rothenberg; and Adam Driver

photo by Joan Marcus

Set primarily in the immediate aftermath of WWII, The Retributionists focuses on a quartet of Jewish resistance fighters as they attempt to come to grips with their function in the post-war world. Dov (played by Adam Driver) is the intellectual and charismatic leader, who convinced his followers from the (unnamed) ghetto not to meekly board the trains to what turned out to be certain death in the concentration camps, but to instead resist by escaping into the forest, stealing livestock, burning houses, bombing train tracks and destroying a power plant, (and killing, when necessary). Anika (Margarita Levieva) is his adoring disciple and fiancé, who has ostensibly followed Dov’s every wish and command. Dinchka (Cristin Milioti), a delicate beauty, is Dov’s true love object, but has qualms about Dov and Anika’s post-war plans and is willing to express them; and Jascha (Adam Rothenberg) is the Aryan-looking Jew who is hopelessly in love with Anika, and is willing to do anything for her hand. Of course, there are complicated triangulated relationships here, centering on the two women’s love for their leader and inspiration, Dov, and the two men’s’ love for Anika (as Jascha describes it, “He [Dov] loves you as a disciple. I love you as a woman.”)

The play begins after the end of the war. Dov and Anika are implementing their plan to poison the water supply in Germany. Their stated goal (“Plan A”) is to kill “a German for every Jew” that was killed by the Nazis. On his way into Germany with cyanide to be dumped into German reservoirs, Dov is joined by Dinchka, who confesses that she is having second thoughts about the plan, because of “the children .” When Dov is betrayed (by whom will not be divulged here) and arrested, Jascha is told by Anika that, because of his Aryan looks, his role is “Plan B,” which is to get work in a bakery in Nuremberg and to poison the bread that is taken into the prison where the Nazi war criminals were being kept. Jascha, who has already lost some body parts in the resistance and knows the danger he will be in, only agrees to take part after Anika promises to marry him if he does so (and survives). The plan works, to a degree: more than 2,000 Nazi prisoners take sick from the arsenic that Jascha has painted onto the crust of their bread. But no one dies. Dov, who was released from prison because “the Germans don’t want Jews in their jails right now,” and Anika see this as the ultimate failure: the dream of vengeance that kept them alive through the deprivations of the war has ended in failure. They feel their lives are effectively over; having failed in their plan of vengeance, they feel they have nothing to live for. Jascha leaves in disgust after returning to Paris to find his beloved Anika married to Dov and pregnant with his child. Dinscka, on the other hand ha s found new meaning in life by emigrating to Palestine.

The “action” between the characters is the weakest part of the play, which is really a morality tale about the nature of Justice: In the forest during the war, 18 yr. old Anika gives Dov the battle cry that he used to inspire their comrades and got them through: “When you kill Jews, there are consequences. . . . Justice and revenge are the same.” When Dinschka expresses her doubts about the plan to Dov on the train to deliver the cyanide (“All this violence, from us? . . . Jews aren’t terrorists.”), Dov says, “The dream of retribution is what kept us alive.” “But it’s not what will keep us alive,” Dinchka replies, telling Dov that they will have “the blood of millions on [their] hands.” Dov responds: “If we don’t do it, then it will happen again. . . . this is more than retribution. This is idealism.” Dinschka replies: But isn’t doing it making it happen again?” In the end, Dinschka answers the question of what constitutes justice for the Jews of Europe: “Palestine. . . . That’s the best revenge of all.”

This play by Daniel Goldfarb reads much better than performed, at least in this production. On stage, the attention went to Dov and Anika, as the action players, the ones seeking justice in the form of revenge and retribution, while the characters of “conscience,” Dinschka and, to a lesser degree, Jascha, are seen as weak and wavering. As such, the play is but the latest in the new, revisionist view of the plight of Jews in Europe during and after World War II, romanticizing real events (i.e. the Jewish resistance portrayed in Defiance, and the poisoning of German prisoners at Nuremberg), or exaggerating fictional resistance ( Inglorious Basterds ), in order to remake the image of Jews from victims of Nazi violence to warriors who fought back and gave as good as they got. This is a questionable premise. What does it serve to take the real life victims of the Holocaust and cast them as pseudo-Nazis themselves in their desire and alleged attempt to exact vengeance on the German people, including children who had no role in carrying out the horrors of the Holocaust? Do we really want to invert the history of the Holocaust and elicit sympathy for the Germans? As the population with actual memory of the Holocaust ages out, do we want to distort the memory of the horrors that were perpetrated by glorifying equally horrific acts of vengeance and calling it “justice?” One need look no further than 9/11 to see the danger of this point of view.

The play reads very differently from what is described above. In the script, the weakest character, Dinschka, comes upon the ultimate revenge for the Jews: Palestine and the ultimate creation of the Jewish State. If one wants to write about the transformation of Jews from victims of violence into heroic defenders of their faith, property and territory, one need only look to the history of Israel from 1948-1967, when Israel was repeatedly attacked by numerically superior forces of the combined Arab countries and prevailed (which happens to have the added advantage of being true). Unfortunately, Dinschka was not afforded the stage time to fully thresh out the ideas that were written for her; the play, as staged, was primarily the story of Dov and Anika.

As a play, the production was mixed, as was the cast. Of the leading players, Adam Driver, as Dov, lacked the on-stage presence to make one believe in Dov as a charismatic leader who was able to lead his followers out of the ghetto, keep them together and alive in the forests of Europe, and, ultimately to plan such a daring act of vengeance. His persona better fit the wavering Dov who questioned his will to live at the end of the play, after his Plan had failed. Margarita Levieva, as Anika, was more convincing as the teenage follower cum world-wise co-conspirator and the ultimate manipulator of her two male lovers, but less so as the woman trying to keep her love interest, Dov, interested in her in the end, after their shared dream of vengeance had failed, reinforcing the argument made by Jascha: whether Dov loved Anika as a disciple or as a woman. Adam Rothenberg, in the more limited role of Jascha, had the Aryan looks necessary for his role and performed well as the hopeless lover willing to expose himself to great danger to win the hand of his love object, Anika. Finally, Jascha Cristin Milioti, as Dinschka, was perhaps the most accomplished of the cast, combining delicate features with the strength to argue with Dov, but, as mentioned, was not given enough lines or stage time to balance the emphasis on “the Plan.” Perhaps this could have been corrected by direction (Leigh Silverman), or, perhaps, this was the product of such direction.

The sets (Derek McLane), costumes (Susan Hilferty) and lighting (Peter Kaczorowski) were appropriately subdued, given the subject matter of the play.

opened on September 14 ^th at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42^nd Street.