Stage:

...In the destructive final moments of the play, Srulik loses his arm, his friends, his theater and, perhaps as important, his dummy, through whose mouth he is capable of the courage he never expresses directly...

...He is central to a major theme of the play-more important even than the theater as a life-in-death image, although Sobol may not think so-for he is a prime instance of a man's becoming what he does...

...The central figure is (or ought to be) Gens, the head of the ghetto who works with the Nazis, maneuvering to save some Jews by sacrificing others...

...He becomes as authoritarian and aggressive as his position demands, seeming to borrow from the Germans he is fighting...

...In an interview in the New York Times (April 30), Sobol indicates that there was a message to the original Israeli audience which the American audience might not hear...

...Anyone who does not have Hebrew may not be able to sort out the real Sobol work, but playing with various versions contributes to the ambiguity that the play demands...

...GERALD WEALES...

...As it happens, both of the Sobol plays I have seen, Ghetto and Shooting Magda, are performance-within-performance works in which Sobol deals directly with painful reality and at the same time presents a reflection of that reality through theater...

...Directed by Ged-alia Besser, who did the original production in Haifa in 1984, the play sometimes lacks focus...

...His ideational opposite is the librarian Kruk-idealist to Gens's pragmatist-whose diary serves as a narrative bridge for Sobol...

...For one thing, Kittel-with saxophone in one hand, machine gun in the other-is one of the most vivid characters on stage, an evil figure who, particularly as Stephen McHattie plays him, suggests the nasty, art-loving Nazi of wartime movies...

...There is more to it than that, however...

...But he also wants to send a warning to his countrymen which may be even more important to Israel today than it was when the play was written during the war in Lebanon...

...Gens makes no attempt to ingratiate himself with Kittel, but when he bargains with the Nazi for Jewish lives, the act of bargaining and Kittel's response to it brand him as the collaborator, the Jew-killer whom Kruk and the others see in him...

...The play is a survivor's recollection of those days (1942-43) after the massive genocidal murders in Vilna when the remaining Jews are shut up in the ghetto, trying to stay alive-physically, spiritually, culturally...

...The production, as often happens at the Wilma, was so heavy with video/audio devices that it was difficult to get any real sense of the play...

...Kruk and Srulik figure in this context, too...

...It is Gens who insists on the formation of the theater, and Kruk, who at first opposes him ("No theater in a graveyard"), finally recognizes that the theater is a defense against total destruction of the Jewish soul...

...GERALD WEALESquare, May 28...

...Kruk, as written and as played, is a bland figure, no match for Gens...

...The other main character-at least, in the Circle production-is Weiskopf, the tailor who becomes a ghetto tycoon...

...The dummy is customarily performed by a live actor (here, effectively, by Gordon Joseph Weiss), but if a real ventriloquist with a real dummy played Srulik, there might be an electrifying final moment when the dummy is shot and bleeds from the mouth...

...If you want to juggle three Sobols at once, which might not be a bad thing to do, there is still another English version, by Miriam Shlesin-ger...

...I had read the play in the Elinor Fuchs collection, Plays of the Holocaust, in an adaptation by Jack Viertel, first performed at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles in 1986...

...Since Srulik, from whose mind the play emerges, is an old man, an almost unwilling witness, his "is a mixture of factual and imaginative memory," as Sobol says in a program note...

...his drunkenness suggests a vulnerability and self-doubt that never surface in the Circle production...

...Closedat the Circle in the Square, May 28...

...man-is more formidable...

...George Hearn's Gens is too cold, too carefully separated from his people, and although his defense of his behavior has force, he never becomes the suffering center of the play as I suspect he should...

...Despite Sobol's doubts, the theme is not hard for an American audience to grasp...

...but that may have been a conscious choice, forcing the audience to find the immediate point of action in a presentation that pretends to walk the line between the real and the theatrical...

...In Viertel's version of the play, Gens's big apology speeches grow out of the bottle...

...Elinor Fuchs completely ignores Weiskopf in her introductory remarks, and I confess I paid minimal attention to him when I first read the play...

...The main characters in the play are based on actual inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto, but the play depends on their viability not their historical truth...

...It is a memory play, and not simply in the sense of remembering what the Passover Holocaust services embody...

...Kruk, as a scholar of Jewish culture, becomes an ally of Dr...

...Sobol wants, as he says, "to capture these voices from the past, which otherwise would vanish," to make a vital metaphor of the Vilna Ghetto theater...

...There are also problems with the current production of Ghetto at the Circle in the Square, although it is generally an effective presentation of a fascinating work...

...Similarly, the atmospheric lighting which occasionally obscures the stage may have been thematic in intention...

...A puppeteer, who to his surprise became artistic director of the ghetto theater, Srulik recalls ghetto life and the theater in a way that lets the actors move from character to caricature, from scenes to sketches, from speech to song...

...The main problem for me-more an enrichment than a problem, perhaps-is that I knew the work too well and in a version other than the one being used in New York...

...His uniform-repairing business begins as a way of surviving, for the ghetto workers as well as himself, but he ends by narrowly calculating the costs, forgetting that in his circumstances to cut corners is to cut lives...

...The subtitle of Ghetto in the Circle program is "The Last Performance in the Vilna Ghetto...

...In Robert Skloot's discussion of the play in his important book on Holocaust drama, The Darkness We Carry, Skloot does no more than mention Weiskopf, describing him parenthetically as a "Jewish profiteer...

...Shooting Magda, which had its American premiere at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater in 1987, puts an attempt to film the story of a young Palestinian woman at the center of its account of the conflict between Jews and Arabs...

...The Circle production offers David Lan's translation, which was commissioned by and is currently playing at the National Theatre in London...

...Echoing one of Kruk's speeches, Sobol says that "there is one stage from humanism to nationalism to bestiality...

...After all, it is not unknown in this part of the globe for defense to turn into rationalization and for doing to become being...

...Yet, it is Gens that carries the burden of this theme...

...Paul, the archivist of Judaism without Jews, and Srulik is so identified with his dummy that he can be said to have died with him...

...On stage, he cannot be ignored-partly because of the flamboyance with which Donal Donnelly plays him...

...Gens's other opponent-Kittel, the S.S...