Reviews
(l-r) Andi Potamkin, Greg Mullavey
Photo courtesy Richard Termine
When an Atrocity Lacks Documentation, and Truth Is Hard to Prove
By ANITA GATES
Speeches by professional Holocaust deniers must have appeared in films and on television programs, but mercifully I had missed them. So Dee Pelletier’s frightening monologue as Brenda Goodsen in “The Soap Myth,” now at the Black Box Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center, was a revelation. That’s the sort of thing these people say?
The Culture Catch
The Power of Myth
By JAY REISBERG
Great theater is not always a comfortable experience--indeed, a measure of unease might be a requirement for compelling drama. The Soap Myth, a superbly written, acted, and directed play, richly compensates the audience for whatever discomfort they might experience along the way to this play’s conclusion. The action of this chamber drama is carried forward by a series of amazingly crisp, powerful, and natural conversations among the four-person cast. There are various pairings and groupings of the four, with two players portraying additional characters. The topic is one man’s passionate and relentless quest to conclusively answer what has become a lingering or malingering question: Did the Nazis actually manufacture soap from the body fat of their Jewish victims?
The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
The Soap Myth Off-Broadway: “Unreliable Memories” and the Holocaust
By LISA GRUNBERGER
Although I saw it over 48 hours ago, The Soap Myth, playing in NYC at the Black Box Theatre, through April 22nd, continues to haunt me. This is the theatre of witness at its best - provocative and morally ambiguous that raises more questions than it answers. Playwright Jeff Cohen and director of the National Jewish Theatre, Arnold Mittelman's The Soap Myth explores the claim that the Nazis made soap out of Jewish bodies.
History News Network
"The Soap Myth" Does Not Cleanse the Nazis or Holocaust
By BRUCE CHADWICK
I try to read, watch, and see as much about the Holocaust as I possibly can, and the most horrific disaster in human history still startles and disgusts me. How could it possibly have happened? What did the world learn from it?
New Jersey Jewish Standard
Reworked play ‘nails it’ in portraying survivor archetypes
By JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
It was the early 1970s. I was a volunteer at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn — really just an office at that Yeshiva of Flatbush that Yaffa Eliach, my teacher, had commandeered from the principal (her husband, David). It served almost as a drop-in center for the hundreds of Shoah survivors who lived in the immediate neighborhood, and was one of the building blocks of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan.