That is the simple, dark, and brilliant truth at the heart of "King of the Jews," the brave and humane piece of theater that Leslie Epstein has hewn from his own 1979 novel about a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. This is a closely observed and specific Holocaust story, and it is also a huge and universal one about how any of us can wake up in a nightmare world in which no choice feels right, but making no choice is impossible.
Epstein has taken the sprawling cast and events of his novel and distilled them into a few people in a single room. In this production by the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, a stunningly taut staging by Jon Lipsky on Jon Savage's ingeniously claustrophobic set, the distillation works. For the eponymous "king" and the Jewish council he leads (our musicians among them) lie at the center of the story and of its concerns.
Forced by the Nazis to rule their fellow Jews in the ghetto, the 10 members of this "Judenrat" soon become both judge and prisoner, victim and executioner. The council must select 100 Jews to be sent away -- to work on a farm, the council members are told, but even without the horrible knowledge that hindsight gives us, they have their doubts. And so the bargaining begins: Can they reduce the quota by offering bribes? Send the old and weak, who would probably die soon anyway, or condemn the criminals, who "deserve" whatever fate they get, or sacrifice themselves?
It is not so much the specifics of their bargains as the horror of having to make such bargains at all that propels the story forward, and us along with it. Is I.C. Trumpelman, the enigmatic leader (based on the actual, and controversial, head of the Lodz ghetto), a self-serving collaborator or a canny protector? Is it corrupt or noble to sleep with the enemy if it might save a friend? Would suicide be the coward's way out, or the only moral answer to a command to do evil?
