Seeking Justice . . . Via Theater

Edward Bernstein is an engaging fellow: verbal, appealing, nice. And a lawyer. Retired. He quit work at age 62. “I wanted to play tennis.” Fourteen years ago. “I enjoyed being a lawyer very much. I made money at it, too.” Enough money to quit Central Park West and settle in Lenox. “But I retired earlier than I should,” he says. “I need to use my brain.” So he wrote a play, “The Trial of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” We are sitting at an outside table in Jenifer Commons in Great Barrington where Aglet Theatre Company was rehearsing “Trial” last week. It’s a play about the consequences of politicians’ decisions. It’s a play about people called U-boats, German Jews, generally, who drifted in 1939, homeless, alone, sleeping under bridges and walking city streets, avoiding the notice of Nazis. It’s about “catchers,” usually their acquaintances, sometimes Jews themselves, who turned the U-boats in to the authorities. It’s a play about leaders among the Allies protecting, in the main, their own hides. It’s a play about Heaven and Hell. And about judgment. A few years ago Bernstein read a novel about this period and these events and concluded that FDR should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. So Bernstein went ahead and conducted a prosecution of his own. As theater. “It is my view of the evidence,” Bernstein says. In the main, it is about Mandel, whose wife died because Roosevelt would not grant a shipful of European Jews on the German transatlantic liner St. Louis safe haven in the United States. Four neutral countries — Holland, Belgium, France and England, finally admitted them. But these desperate people were back in Europe and many of them died there. Like Mandel’s wife, in Buchenwald. So Mandel questions Roosevelt in Heaven’s court. Roosevelt, nearing reelection at the time, had figured “No country wanted to be flooded by Jews.” And so, Mandel argues, Roosevelt condemned his wife to death. The play started out as a one-act trial with clips from Edward R. Murrow’s reporting on Buchenwald and a cast of 30 characters. No one will produce a play with 30 people, writer/actor Andrew Joffe told Bernstein. And no one wants a research project on stage. So with advice from Joffe and from Nicki Wilson, founder of the New Stage Performing Arts Center in Pittsfield, he rewrote it as a two-act play. With 7 or 8 actors. “It had to be what happened to people,” Bernstein told me. And it is. “The Trial of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” runs Thursdays through Sundays, Sept.1-18, at the New Stage Performing Arts Center, 55 North St.For tickets, call 413-418-0999.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less