STAGE REVIEW : Jewish Children Battle the Nazis in Holocaust Drama

As Holocaust dramas go, “The Survivor” may not be “The Diary of Anne Frank,” but it’s sturdy stuff. Had “The Survivor” come out around the time of “Anne Frank” (1955), it certainly would have triggered noticeable waves, commercial and otherwise.

Adapted from Jack Eisner’s autobiographical book, “The Survivor” launches the new American Jewish Repertory Theatre.

In its own personal way (Eisner literally lived this story as a 15-year-old pack leader outwitting Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto), “The Survivor” is the action-adventure flip side to the more internalized “Anne Frank.” Near the end of “The Survivor,” following months of smuggling food into the ghetto under Nazi noses, these Jews are brandishing rocks and Molotov cocktails and fighting the butchers at their own game.

Introduced to L.A. last May at the Hudson Theatre, the play now, with a new cast and intricate lighting and set design, capably fills the 175-seat proscenium space at the Exhibit Center of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

While much of the center’s vast space has been cordoned off, the experience is still akin to watching a play in a big auditorium. The seating is not raked; you tend to look up at the actors. But the 11 actors would be vivid if you were standing on your head.

Led by Martin Finn’s dashing rebel Jacek (Eisner’s alter ego), the cast is uniformly gifted with sufficient presence to essentially overcome the play’s rather clunky dramatic structure, which frequently comes to a halt for expository monologues.

Playwright Susan Nanus, while revamping the play last year for a children’s theater company in an Israeli kibbutz, stumbled upon the idea of cutting all the Nazis and parents out of Eisner’s original text--a smart move that saves the play from wailing mothers and stereotypical figures in swastika armbands.

Director Sasha Nanus makes her cast seem larger than it is by cleverly staging the action over, under and through designer Alexandra Rubinstein’s huge, wooden ramparts of a ghetto.

All the characters nicely counterpoint one another. A steely young girl (scrappy ghetto defender Sarabeth Tucek) is offset by the hero’s sweet Polish girlfriend (the affecting Jennifer Leigh Hochman) who lives outside the ghetto. Among the boys, the nerdy David Kaufman and the tough Matt Pashkow gradually assume the traits of one another. Of the children in this play, only Eisner survived the war.

This is a play perfect for young people ungrounded in this hellish history, because it is not moralizing nor complex nor intellectually weighty.

Eisner, a New York importer who appeared at the show Sunday, told the audience in response to a question about the spread of Fascism in Germany today: “I will always harbor feelings against the Germans of my generation, but I also know that every one of us must break through the barriers that separate us and live together as one multicultural society.”

* The Survivor,” Wilshire Boulevard Temple, 3663 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 20. $12-$15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.