The new script for Imagining Madoff has many of the things that were present the first time Theater J planned its staging. Talmudic excerpts. Meditations on the New York Mets. Lapidary dialogue verging on poetry. And a hauntingly wrought Madoff character, a notorious but little-known villain through whom playwright Deb Margolin delivers a portrait of [...]

Deb Margolin's Imagining Madoff, as you probably remember, never opened the 2010-2011 season of Theater J as originally intended. The play—a freewheeling inquiry into the mind and morality of Bernard Madoff that invented a booze-soaked encounter between the disgraced financier and the humanitarian icon Elie Wiesel—was derailed after Wiesel threatened legal action against the theater, taking [...]

In today's Washington Post, Jane Horwitz breaks out the theatrical tea dregs: She writes that Theater J will stage a reading of Deb Margolin's work Three Seconds in the Key as part of a series at the Lincoln Theatre next week, as sure a sign as we've seen that company and playwright are moving toward bringing [...]

[Ed. note: Thanks to the legal team of Elie Wiesel, our critic was unable to attend Imagining Madoff on 16th street as previously planned. Instead, he had to hoof it to Hudson, N.Y.]
Deb Margolin's button-pushing character study of Bernie Madoff never got a chance to open Theater J's 2010-11 season, but a modified version of [...]

In today's New York Times, Patrick Healy recounts the ordeal this spring that led playwright Deb Margolin to pull her play Imagining Madoff from Theater J's 2010-2011 season. The occasion for the article? Imagining Madoff is premiering tomorrow, in revised form, at Stageworks/Hudson in Hudson, N.Y. The original version included a fictionalized Elie Wiesel, who [...]

We probably won't know for a while whether Imagining Madoff will return to Theater J for its 2011-2012 season. Here's what Artistic Director Ari Roth told me this spring, not long after Theater J announced it would not be staging the play after its writer, Deb Margolin, walked: "I will produce that play in September [...]

D.C.'s Theater J may have backed down from placing fictionalized versions of Bernie Madoff and Elie Wiesel on the same stage, but for this week's City Paper, we were happy to place them on the same cover. Film and Theater Editor Ted Scheinman and I wrote this week's cover story, in which we reconstruct the [...]