MIXED – Irena’s Vow – Open Run

Left: Tovah Feldshuh as Irena Gut Opdyke in Irena's Vow
At the Walter Kerr Theatre, W. 48th Street . This new play features Tovah Feldshuh as Irena Gut Opdyke along with a supporting cast of nine. Irena was a real-life heroine, a young Polish Catholic who saved the lives of Jews whom she hid away in the basement of the house of a German officer. By all accounts, her true story is inspiring and amazing; unfortunately, the play (by Dan Gordon) suffers from a heroic portrayal of Irena and a cardboard-cutout approach to all the rest of the characters.
Lorette, an outspoken Israeli woman, reported: "The play is so bad that I felt uncomfortable. But the real story of Irena is more interesting than the play itself. What made it interesting for me was that Irena Gut Opdyke's daughter spoke about her mother after the play. The play doesn't go into what happened to the German officer after the war; when he returned to Germany after the war, Rugemer was rejected in his own community, and was taken in and lived until his death with one of the Jewish families who had sheltered in his basement. Their son thought the old man was his zayde (grandfather). But this is not in the play."
Rosemarie was more favorably disposed to the play:

"I liked it very much. It has weaknesses as a play because only Irena's character is filled out. The other roles basically serve to illuminate her action. Nevertheless,her story, which is true, shows how a 20 year-old girl saves 12 people's lives, at the risk of her own, and the obstacles she overcomes in doing so, and the price she pays for doing it."

Martin Denton reviewed the play for nytheatre.com:

“Tovah Feldshuh, as committed and oversized a theatrical presence as ever in the role of Irena, is probably at her best in the portions of the show that embrace the solo performance ethos: she bonds with the audience with great warmth as she narrates her tale to us (the play's framing concept is that Irena is lecturing at a high school in 1988, with the audience her students). And in a few scenes where she portrays both Irena and other characters (a house full of storm troopers, for example), the drama is urgent and palpable. Half a dozen underwritten characters, plus some smaller cameos, are assigned here to nine actors, only two of whom really have an opportunity to make much of an impression. (Both do good work within the limitations of the script—Thomas Ryan as Rugemer and Steven Hauck as Herr Schultz, another of Rugemer's servants who befriends Irena.) The dozen Jews who are hidden by Irena are represented by actors who play three of them, an odd economy; Gordon seems to go out of his way to present them as needy rather than noble."

For more about Irena's true story, she is covered at this link, the website of the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation