A play about a young Catholic Pole who risked everything to help a dozen Jews during WWII is slip pery ground for a critic — espe cially when it’s based on a real-life hero, Irena Gut Opdyke. Nobody wants to be the heartless Grinch who points out that a Holocaust drama is flawed.
Oh well, here I go then . . .
The noble intentions of “Irena’s Vow” — which opened yesterday at the Walter Kerr after a successful off-Broadway run last fall — and the emotional punch it packs are beyond question. Its achievements on purely theatrical grounds are not.
Dan Gordon’s play is framed as a flashback narrated by the elderly Irena (Tovah Feldshuh), with the bulk taking place during the war years, when Irena (Feldshuh again) hid fugitives in an underground space below the very house of her Nazi employer, Major Rugemer (Thomas Ryan).
Feldshuh goes from 70 to 20 in 10 seconds flat. She switches shoes, loosens her hair and presto — the 56-year-old actress is a 20-year-old girl in occupied Poland. It’s one of the single most dramatic moments in the production, which says an incriminating lot about the flatness of both Gordon’s script and Michael Parva’s direction.
Their inadequacy is reflected, for instance, in the handling of the most potentially challenging scenes, which are about making fraught, split-second decisions. (“Irena’s Choice,” if you will.)
When the Jews, already crammed into a tight cellar, are asked to take in an additional man, should they welcome him or decide there simply isn’t enough space for an extra body?
When one of the women becomes pregnant, should she keep the baby, or would its cries alert the major and endanger the entire group?
These are complex, fascinating issues because they pit personal ethics against collective safety. But each time, Gordon quickly sums up the pros and cons, announces the outcome, and glides on to the next cloak-and-dagger episode.
This approach certainly makes for zippy pacing, but it prevents an in-depth investigation of murky moral concerns.
In any event, ambiguity isn’t really the point here. The point is Irena/Tovah, and the show is entirely built around both the character and the actress. Feldshuh gives her all, of course, but the constant emphasis on Irena and her quasi-saintly behavior also leeches out conflict and drama.
This single-minded focus may be a blessing in disguise, however, as the cast is wildly uneven. As German officers, for instance, Ryan and John Stanisci are so blandly meek as to make you wonder how these Nazis could possibly have conquered half of Europe.
“Irena’s Vow” essentially is an after-school special — and I mean this in a good way. It’s unfortunate the expression has acquired such negative baggage because this particular show is important, and it is presented in a brisk, accessible and appealing manner. Yet while it deals with real issues, “Irena’s Vow” also has real problems.
elisabeth.vincentelli@nypost.com
IRENA’S VOW Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St.; 212-239-6200.