INTERVIEW: Richard Topol on his role in off-Broadway’s ‘King of the Jews’
Photo: Richard Topol stars in King of the Jews at the HERE Arts Center in New York City. Photo courtesy of HERE Arts Center / Provided by JT PR with permission.
Richard Topol, the celebrated actor of TV, film and many stage productions, is currently starring in King of the Jews, an adaptation of Leslie Epstein’s novel from the late-1970s. The play depicts one of the most challenging moments during the Holocaust, according to press notes. Here’s the premise: “One night after curfew in the Astoria Café, a group of waiters and cooks and entertainers, along with a spare rabbi or two, are forced by the German occupiers to form a Judenrat, a group of self-governing Jews who will thenceforth govern the lives — and determine the deaths — of their co-religionists in the ghetto that surrounds them.”
This particular stage adaptation first premiered more than 15 years ago in Boston, but this production, directed by Alexandra Aron, serves as the play’s off-Broadway premiere. Performances continue through Saturday, Nov. 18, at the HERE Arts Center in Downtown Manhattan.
Topol is a well-known actor to New York City theatergoers. He has previously appeared in Indecent, Fish in the Dark, The Normal Heart and Merchant of Venice, all on Broadway. He’s also a recurring guest star on NBC’s Manifest and played Fritz Haber in Genius: Einstein. Recently the actor exchanged emails with Hollywood Soapbox about his new role. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What attracted you to this role and this play?
I was drawn to the crazy journey this character goes on as he gets sucked into this warped world. He seems to lose all his moral and ethical bearings, and that intrigued me as an actor. I don’t often get to play characters like this, and so I jumped at the chance to spend a few months in this guy’s mind. And the play asks such a powerful question of us all — what happens to human beings when they are put in seemingly inhuman circumstances? I thought that was worth exploring.
With such a serious topic at the center of the play, how do you internalize the drama and get in the mind of your character?
Yeah, it’s dark. But it’s also passionate. He’s sort of madly in love with this renowned singer at the cafe. I see Gotterman as a lonely man. He roams the ghetto as a doctor saving lives, but he’s got no family, no real human connections. So I try to stay away from everyone else in the cast before the show. Just a little self-isolation to spark the combination of loneliness and narcissism that sets him off on his journey.
Does performing a piece like this change you as a performer? As a human?
Change me as a human? You’ll have to ask my wife. Lol. I think I’m definitely less fun to live with right now. And as a performer, I think the fact that we are in this immersive theater space where the audience is both all around you and just a few feet away has forced us all to be 10 times more focused and truthful, which is exciting and exhausting at the same time. Will that change me as a performer in the next piece I’m doing, which also deals with the Holocaust in Poland? We shall see.
What has it been like working with director Alexandra Aron?
Alex and I both worked really hard to try to find the human being in Gotterman underneath the monster that Leslie wants to have roaming the stage. She’s been really supportive of my journey to find this guy’s truth. It wasn’t an easy journey, that’s for sure.
What do you think it is about Leslie Epstein’s words that work so well on stage and on the page?
Leslie’s tried to reach for this wild combination of Beckett with some Ionesco, Sartre’s No Exit and maybe a little Dürrenmatt, with some vaudeville thrown in. We succeed the most when we just dive from one flavor to the next. And he’s written some great monologues, some great stories that we get to tell. There’s a beautiful combination of the mundane and the poetic that I’m finding really pleasurable to perform. And c’mon, who doesn’t like to lose their mind onstage?
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
King of the Jews, starring Richard Topol, continues through Saturday, Nov. 18, at the HERE Arts Center in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
