The Accomplices

A PLACE AT THE TABLE Polk, Sauli and Lister-Jones, from left, work toward Jewish visibility.

Photograph: Carol Rosegg

In his AIDS drama The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer urged gay people to noisy activism by invoking a bitter historical counterexample: the determined quietism of the American Jewish community—afraid of calling attention to itself and alienating the Roosevelt administration—when the U.S. was slamming the door to refugees from Hitler’s Europe. This sorry period of apology for American inaction is now the subject of its own play: Bernard Weinraub’s substantial, punch-packing The Accomplices, a morality thriller about grassroots activism and back-room politics in the deepening shadow of Nazi genocide.

This is a story that needs to be told, and Weinraub—a longtime New York Times reporter—does so with moving clarity. Under Ian Morgan’s judicious direction for the New Group, The Accomplices’ nine-person cast delivers first-rate work. Daniel Sauli anchors the play as Peter Bergson, the charmingly pugnacious mouthpiece of a protest group that also includes his friends Merlin (Andrew Polk) and Betty (the sensitively poised Zoe Lister-Jones). David Margulies, as the overcautious white-shoe rabbi Stephen Wise, and Robert Hogan, as FDR’s obstructionist immigration overseer Breckenridge Long, offer valuable support, as does Jon DeVries (who bites with equal relish into his roles as the conflicted Roosevelt and the socially engaged Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht). If the play rarely exceeds the exigencies of historical exposition, what it exposes is a bracing reminder, as timely now as ever, of silence’s complicity with death. — Adam Feldman