INTERVIEW: Jeremiah Kissel imagines the villainy of Madoff
Photo: From left, Gerry Bamman and Jeremiah Kissel star in Imagining Madoff. Photo courtesy of Jody Christopherson / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
Bernie Madoff is an economic villain of grand proportions, someone who became the poster child for run-amok capitalism and corporate greed. The new play Imagining Madoff, produced by New Light Theater Project, tells the story of Madoff, the infamous fraudster who was arrested and charged with running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, according to reports.
The play, penned by Deb Margolin and directed by Jerry Heymann, stars Jeremiah Kissel as the title character. He returns to the role for an encore engagement after its Boston premiere and sold-out run earlier this year at 59E59 Theaters in New York City. This time around, Imagining Madoff is playing the Lion on Theatre Row in Midtown Manhattan.
“I did audition, in fact,” Kissel said in a recent phone interview. “I got a suburban house out here in Boston, and they got in touch and said, ‘Could you come out and read for the director?’”
Kissel eventually won the role, and he was faced with the excitement of portraying a contemporary figure who was the stuff of tabloid legend, one of the most disrespected and disliked men in the headlines during the time of the recession. In other words: an interesting character to play on stage.
“It was pretty much excitement because I don’t get that many villains, and if you want to characterize it with a capital V you could,” he said. “The best he’s going to make is anti-hero I think, so that was kind of exciting. And it was sexy. It was just really delicious sounding, and then when I got the play and I just read it, I fell right into it. It’s just really well written. Deb Margolin has a voice for the guy that I knew when I read it. I understood the way his brain was working.”
To truly understand the role of Madoff, Kissel needed several performances under his theatrical belt. Then, after figuring out the guy, he realized that the playwright is trying characterize the man on a human level.
“It’s very existential really, the question being how much of anyone including ourselves is ever really seen by others,” Kissel said. “She took a guy who lived a lie, and so nobody really knew who he was. Nobody really saw him. She picks that and extrapolates and translates that out. The play kind of asks the question, when you go home tonight and turn to your other in the bedroom, and you say, ‘I love you darling,’ do you really mean it? Do you really know who you’re talking about? When they say it to you, do they really know what they’re saying? Do they really, really know you? That’s a deep-level question.”
He added: “As far as sympathy for Madoff goes, that’s an interesting question, but I don’t really think about that one too much. I’m more interested in what watching his story gives [the audience] the next day. What do they wake up thinking about? How am I going to live my life a little differently today so it’s better?”
In some ways, Madoff’s character arc is Shakespearean in nature, and that fits Kissel well because he has portrayed many roles in the Bard’s oeuvre.
“I’ve been in Shakespeare plays, and I’ve realized overtime — it took a long time — but I realized over time that very few of them were really about what they seemed to be about,” he said. “They were about much deeper stuff. Turns out, Macbeth wasn’t a play about ambitions and witches. It was a play about progeny, the process of humans finding another of the opposite sex and creating progeny. … Richard III is not so much about this villain as it is about self-actualization, and so in that it is I think Shakespearean. The mere simple silly little story of Bernie Madoff stealing money is not really what’s interesting. What’s interesting is we as humans navigating through life, navigating through this timespan, this dimension that we have. How much do we really see?”
Kissel said if the story was simply about a crook, it wouldn’t be worth the effort and certainly not worth the encore presentation, but because the play goes deeper, he is perpetually fascinated.
“What’s in there to explore,” he asked. “This is what I hang on to, and the more I hang to it, the deeper and the more important it gets. You have a real reason to do it and to be in the theater and see it because you might find some insights into your own life.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Imagining Madoff, by Deb Margolin and starring Jeremiah Kissel, continues through Nov. 9 at the Lion on Theatre Row in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
