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REVIEW: Nazi Doctor Turns the Tables in a 'Paradise Key'

Originally Published: March 19, 2010 at 1:13 PM

By Steve Parks | steve.parks@newsday.com

From Newsday.com

 

"Paradise Key" is anything but. Yes, it's part of the Florida Keys chain of islands on Dean Poynor's fictional map in his grim drama making its world premiere at Arena Players. But to the former Third Reich doctor who's been flown here from Argentine exile, it's a tropical Hades.

The ocean roils outside as lights go up, dimly, at a U.S. Army safe house on a summer night in 1951. Dr. Halb demands a drink and a cigarette. David, his interrogator, enters with a briefcase and a pack of smokes he promptly shares. But when asked for a light, David ignores the question. Although he can recite Geneva Convention terms for war criminals - they're to be provided tobacco, one paragraph stipulates - there's no mention of matches. The war's long over, David observes, and Halb is no soldier.

The American counterintelligence agent wants the formula for a polio vaccine Halb developed, using concentration camp prisoners as research fodder. The doctor regarded his subjects as data rather than humans. Now he's unwilling to surrender his secret. But why? Counterintuitively, it may be that even a Nazi bears a conscience.

Bob Budnick as Dr. Halb, paired with John Leone as his interrogator, together present a shaded conundrum in morality. We don't think of the Good Guy as one who swings a baseball bat into the ribs of an old man - the putative Bad Guy - or applies electric shock until his heart, if he has one, threatens to stop.

Budnick nearly pulls off the feat of winning our sympathy despite hateful utterances embroidering his graphic recounting of "heroic" deeds. As David, Leone's portrayal is less nuanced, though no less believable. He's of the ends-justify-the-means school that says saving children sentenced to torturous death by a rampant disease absolves him.

While Poynor, a prizewinning emerging playwright, poses a dilemma that recalls recent torture debates without taking sides, he fails in the end to level the debating field. Halb is the more fully drawn character. David, as we'd expect of an interrogator, reveals little of himself. So we're in no position to judge. Still, "Paradise Key," as directed by Frederic De Feis, who bravely selected it for Arena's annual world premiere production, stages a provocative, real-world Faustian wrestling match.

 

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