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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Irena's Vow — Tovah and Jehovah
By Harry Haun
30 Mar 2009
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Tovah Feldshuh and Jeannie Opdyke Smith (daughter to Irena); director Michael Parva, playwright Dan Gordon and guest Neil Simon.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | So far-fetched and fantastical are the facts in the life of Irena Gut Opdyke — the World War II heroine played by Tovah Feldshuh in Irena's Vow — that a Q&A session fielded by the character's real-life daughter, Jeannie Opdyke Smith, seemed almost mandatory March 29 when the play bowed at the Walter Kerr.
Irene Gut Opdyke was to Occupied Poland what Miep Gies, still alive at age 100, did for the Occupied Netherlands: she hid Jews from the Gestapo and certain death.
Whereas Gies hid the Frank family and four others in the sealed-off back rooms of her company's office building in Amsterdam, Opdyke was able to stash a full dozen in the cellar of a confiscated Jewish villa where she was housekeeper for the highest ranking Nazi officer in the area, a Major Rugemer. This population grew in that cramped confinement, and, when an abortion was proposed as a safety measure for the whole group, Opdyke railed against it. Being a Catholic as well as an eye-witness to the Nazi atrocities being committed, she vowed to save every life she could.
From the audience, Concetta Tomei asked, as a Roman Catholic actress, if Opdyke's plea not to have the abortion was a way of saying: Put your faith in life. Take a chance. God would take care of you. And just as she finished saying those words — as if cued from on high — there was a theatre-shaking clap of thunder, signaling that the rains which had been promised all day had finally arrived. The first-nighters broke into convulsive and sustained laughter, and Smith accepted the divine intervention or whatever it was with good humor: "I can't top that," she said.
At the after-party at TAO on East 58th St., she was still musing over that sign from above. "That's how my mother's whole life was," Smith remarked. "You know, if this were a Hollywood movie and that would have happened, people would have thought that was cheesy, but her life has been one miracle after another like that."
Living proof of that was in the audience — the grandson of one of the people Opdyke hid in the cellar. He expressed, to say the least, his gratitude in the Q&A.
During the earlier Off-Broadway run of the play, Roman Hallar — the "lucky 13th," late-arriving in that cellar community and the subject of the aforementioned abortion debate — surfaced, and he plans to return to see the Broadway production in April.
Smith has momentarily uprooted herself from her life in Washington state to do the question-and-answer postscripts for the show. Her updates bring a different dimension to the 90 minutes of drama — and "it is a way to keep alive the memories of my mother," who died in 2003 at the age of 85.
Should you wonder whatever happened to the smitten Major Rugemer, who agreed to look the other way "if I could think you loved me," Smith would tell you that he was ostracized from all sides after the war because of his affair with her mother and had indeed become a homeless street person when Roman Hallar's parents found him and took him in for the rest of his days. The boy grew up calling him granddad.
Smith is right: Who's going to buy this as a film? (Yes, she said, there've been offers.)
Technically, the stint counts as Smith's Broadway debut, as it does for the show's writer, director and whole cast — save for the star at the wheel in the title role.
Feldshuh, a four-time Tony nominee, arrived fashionably late at TAO, looking newly and glamorously spent, with the fervor of the evening performance still showing.
How close does she think she came to the real woman? "My job is to conjure up her spirit, so a seamless relationship between me and Irena Gut Opdyke was what I wanted," she answered. "It is very important in life to be alive and wrong rather than dead right. Should I move you with certain idiosyncrasies that you'll never know about me except through this role and you'll never see about her because she's dead — rather than be utterly accurate and not moving? I think I'm pretty close. I hope I conjured up her soul, that which is about her that's eternal. What's eternal about her is that she led heart-first — and then she tried to align her circumstances to defend the actions of the heart. Ain't many like that around."
She's been down this real-life-impersonation road before — with disparate examples like Golda, Tallulah, Bernhardt, Hepburn, Vreeland — and Irena Gut Opdyke is accorded the same passion and commitment she spends on better-known one-names, and she was particularly proud to present her "to the home team" on Broadway.
"It's the thrill of my life," she said of the role. "I love this town. I was born on 90th and Lexington at a now-defunct hospital. I went to Sarah Lawrence. I did my graduate work at Columbia. I'm so grateful to be on the New York stage, no less the Broadway stage, in a role like this. I'm thrilled to be an American girl who wanted to become either a litigator or an activist and ended up an actress having this wonderful journey." Continued...
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