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Staging ‘The Model Apartment’

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies (“Dinner With Friends”) first saw images of concentration camps when he was about 6 years old, during TV coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel.
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September 23, 2016

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies (“Dinner With Friends”) first saw images of concentration camps when he was about 6 years old, during TV coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel. “It gave me nightmares,” Margulies said during a recent interview from his office in New Haven, Conn. “It fueled my dream life for years and years to come — maybe for the rest of my life.”

Margulies, now 62, said he was also “morbidly fascinated” as a boy by the concentration camp tattoo on a neighbor’s arm. And he was equally mystified and frightened by the other Holocaust survivors in his Brooklyn neighborhood.

But young Donald was perhaps most deeply affected by his friendship with a classmate whose parents were survivors: “It was this tremendous event in history that was made immediate by my relationship with this family,” he said. “It suddenly wasn’t just black-and-white images on TV, but these people’s experiences and memories. Which is not to say that they talked about it a great deal. But they spoke with accents and had their meshugas that comes from a certain survivors’ mentality.  It was a certain kind of clannishness and suspicion of people not like us, which was understandable, even though it wasn’t always forgivable. They were flawed people, though they were also survivors. There was no hagiography.”

The son of an American-born wallpaper salesman, Margulies said he “didn’t have firsthand the same associations and themes that were inculcated in my friend. But I experienced them vicariously. It was just this sense of persecution … or trivializing issues in my friend’s life in comparison to what the parents had endured.”

Margulies absorbed the survivors’ fear of annihilation as well as a certain kind of Germanophobia that persisted for decades. When his friend’s parents were about to retire to Florida some 30 years ago, he decided to turn his preoccupations into a play — “The Model Apartment,” which opens Oct. 17 at the Geffen Playhouse.

Margulies envisioned a surreal drama in which elderly survivors are again fleeing persecution, this time from their morbidly obese, possibly schizophrenic daughter, who has become a receptacle for all of their Holocaust memories and “a kind of Frankenstein monster created by her parents,” he said. “I think we all feed our children our own histories, and if the history of persecution and horror is instilled in a child, what if that child doesn’t have the mental capacity to overcome that? What if the horror takes over and is paramount?”

In the play, Max and Lola, the survivors, have retired from Brooklyn to their new condominium complex in Florida only to discover upon arrival that their condo is not yet ready for occupancy. They are temporarily relocated to a “model” apartment, which looks inviting until Max and Lola discover that the decorations are glued down and none of the appliances works.

This sham paradise is made even more uncomfortable by the unexpected arrival of their daughter, Debbie, who further traumatizes her parents by sleeping on the floor — just like her mother did in Auschwitz. Debbie invites her teenage African-American, formerly homeless boyfriend to stay in the condo, and spews distorted images of the Holocaust that from childhood she had been fed by her parents.

Debbie describes her fantasies of being taken to the gas chambers and of killing Nazis at a Howard Johnson’s. She envisions doctors cutting her open and stuffing Holocaust victims inside of her. “It’s so crowded and noisy in here, I can’t hear myself think anymore,” she says.

In one scene, she tells Max: “You made me, Daddy-O. You and Mengele and Frankenstein. … They’re all inside of me. … Anne Frank.  The 6 million. … I eat for them so they won’t be hungry.”

The actresses who have portrayed Debbie since the play’s premiere in 1988 have always worn a fat suit onstage. The character was inspired, in part, by a Diane Arbus photograph titled “A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents” that Margulies chanced to see at the Museum of Modern Art while in his late 20s.

“It haunted me,” he said. “I just loved the imagery of this monstrous, enormous child towering over this unassuming, little Jewish couple. It’s a heartbreaking and a sort of darkly comic photo. But for me … it really made the metaphor I was thinking about for the play graphic: Parents who were overwhelmed by this creation of their own making. They produced this monstrosity, this oddity. And Debbie’s gigantic size also makes her a [metaphor] for the enormity of the Holocaust and its legacy.”

The production history of “The Model Apartment” is almost as tortuous as the story itself. The Los Angeles Theatre Center produced the play’s world premiere, but the production was flawed, in part, because the actress who played Debbie refused to recite her character’s concluding monologue. Margulies agreed to the demand, to his everlasting regret. “I was young and I made concessions I shouldn’t have,” he said.

When the play opened at Primary Stages in New York in 1995, cast issues forced the show to close early, despite glowing reviews. Margulies went on to win an Obie Award for that production.

But it was only when Primary Stages revived the play in 2013 that “The Model Apartment” enjoyed its first successful turn at the box office. Critics again lauded the play, with The New York Times’ Ben Brantley calling it “a very fine playwright’s masterwork.”

As for why “The Model Apartment” took so long to gain acclaim, Margulies said, “It’s a very uncompromising play … and it doesn’t coddle its audience. It’s an experience where viewers feel … discomfort and pathos as well as humor. It’s not soothing in any way.”

The play’s postmodern take on Holocaust history has also been a factor, given its less-than-sacrosanct vision of survivors and their children. “As I’ve said before, this is not your bubbe’s Holocaust play,” Margulies aid.

But, he added, perhaps the zeitgeist has caught up with “The Model Apartment,” given the emergence in recent years of untraditional Holocaust works, such as Quentin Tarantino’s film “Inglourious Basterds” and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, “Maus.”

“Perhaps the world wasn’t previously ready for ‘The Model Apartment,’ but now maybe it is,” Margulies said.

“The Model Apartment” will run Oct. 19 through Nov. 20 at the Geffen Playhouse. For more information, visit geffenplayhouse.org.

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