IMAGINING MADOFF
By Deb Margolin
Directed by Frank Licato
Scenic design by Greg Cilmi
WHEN: Thursday, Oct. 25, and runs to Sunday, Nov. 11. Shows are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM
WHERE: Becton Theatre on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck
TICKETS: $37, $32 for seniors and students. Students can rush for remaining seats, at $15 an hour before performance.
Admission on Thursdays is half price for Bergen County residents and Sunday, Oct. 28, is “pay what you can” Sunday, sponsored by the Puffin Foundation.
Call the box office at 201.569.7710 for tickets and directions.
Garage Theatre Group opens its 20th season of professional theatre in New Jersey with Imagining Madoff, a vivid and controversial 90-minute play about Ponzi scheme mastermind, Bernard Madoff. The Puffin Foundation Ltd is a Partner in the Arts with the Garage Theatre Group in presenting this play.
In the play, Madoff is telling the “real” story of the scheme that devastated thousands of lives while his secretary is testifying to the facts before the Security and Exchange Commission. Much of Madoff’s story revolves around an evening spent with Solomon Galkin, an 80-year old Holocaust survivor, poet, translator and treasurer of a shul whose funds Madoff controls.
Galkin is an iconic moral force in the community and, in Margolin’s original version, was based on the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel. When Margolin sent the script to him, Weisel was not pleased, called it “obscene” and ”defamatory,” and threatened to sue her. Stunned and shocked, she withdrew the play from a scheduled production but refused to give up on her script. She rewrote the character and, free from the constraints of writing about a historically real person, was able to create a colorful, dramatically “true” fictitious one.
It’s the imagined real Bernie Madoff, and the imagined true Solomon Galkin, that will clash in the Garage Theatre Group’s production of Imagining Madoff.
The theatrics continue after a virtual curtain comes down. Following every performance at the theater a “Talk Back” session allows members of the audience to have a conversation with the actors and director, and in this case, the playwright as well.
All the actors and the director involved in the production are professional artists from New Jersey. They are Michael Bias from Tenafly, playing Madoff; Thom Molyneaux from Westwood as Galkin and Mikaela Kafka from Hoboken as the secretary.
At the time Imagining Madoff is in rehearsal, veteran director, Frank Licato, has two other shows in production: Jean Genet’s The Balcony at the Arclight Theatre in New York and Gore Vidal’s Best Man at the Summit Playhouse in New Jersey. He has been recognized more than once. For Grapes of Wrath at Chatham Playhouse, he earned the Perry Award for director, best production; for Rod Sterling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, he received a best director nod from the Off-Broadway Review and for Fever at the N.Y. Fringe Festival, he received the audience choice award. He has worked at countless theaters in New York and New Jersey.
(Photo top L-R: Seen at rehearsal are Michael Bias, a Tenafly resident who plays Madoff; Greg Cilmi from Clifton, the set designer; Thom Molyneaux from Westwood who plays Solomon Galkin; and Frank Licato of Weehawken who directs. Photo by Justin Bias)
