Madoff redux: "Tom Durnin' in New York

Sooner or later, someone was bound to write the Bernard Madoff story, and playwright Steven Levenson was wise to snap it up. This sensational saga of the greatest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history is the stuff of which powerful dramas are made.

As you may recall, Madoff, former chair of NASDAQ and master financier, was arrested in December 2008 and charged with defrauding thousands of investors— many of whom were his relatives and lifelong friends— out of some $18 billion. The tentacles of his pernicious scheme spread over Europe and sent shock waves throughout the financial world. Madoff pleaded guilty and is now serving a 150-year prison sentence.

Rather than present us with a glitzy screenplay, Wall Street-style (remember the egregious Gordon Gekko?), Levenson has instead given us a small play of quiet intensity. The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin deals with the aftermath of his protagonist's imprisonment. Using a modest yet sharp dramatic lens, Levenson focuses on the protagonist's family, evoking the human tragedy of the Madoff story.

Levenson's fictionalized version begins with the classical "homecoming" story pattern from Greek tragedy (remember what happened to Agamemnon?). In the play's opening moments, Tom Durnin (Levenson's Madoff) stands in the doorway of his son Jamie's apartment. He explains that he's been living in a halfway house (we don't know why yet) and has nowhere to go.

Rejected by family

At first, the taciturn Jamie seems heartless and unresponsive. "What do you want?" Jamie blurts out to his father, who seems genuinely loving and caring as he cajoles his son with fond family memories and pleas to spend time together.

Then we learn that Tom is a lawyer and financier who has been released from a five-year prison sentence for massive security fraud. Disbarred and disgraced, he has been refused asylum by his former wife, his sister and his daughter Annie, Jamie's sister.

Tom asks to borrow $2,000 from his son for a down payment on an apartment rental (Jamie doesn't have it). Then he begs to stay on Jamie's couch for a month. Finally Jamie acquiesces.

Family victims

Gradually, we meet the other members of Tom's family who have suffered deeply as a result of Tom's crimes, who are struggling to put their lives back together, and who are traumatized anew by Tom's reappearance in their vicinity:

— There's Karen, his wife, who — after losing their house and her possessions and living in a motel for three years— steadfastly refuses to speak to Tom. She has met a man of modest means, and has found safety in a new home.

— There's Chris, Tom's good-natured son-in-law, who works in Tom's former firm and, while courteous, firmly shields his wife and children from Tom's attempts to make contact. (Tom's daughter Annie, like her mother, refuses to see her father.)

— Then there's Jamie, who had to drop out of college, whose wife left him, who now sells stethoscopes by day and attends a creative writing class by night. He's the family member who has suffered the most, whose life is least together. And yet he's the one who, unbeknownst to the others, has taken his father in.

"'One big lie'

In the ensuing weeks on his son's living room couch, Tom subtly spins his Machiavellian scheme to insinuate himself back into the lives of his damaged family members. He pressures Jamie into giving him Karen's phone number. When his calls to Karen go unanswered, Tom blackmails his son-in-law Chris into giving him Karen's address, threatening to expose files to the Securities & Exchange Commission that may incriminate Tom's former partners and Chris as well.

"One big lie"— that's how the real Bernard Madoff characterized his life to his two sons on the eve of his arrest. In this play, it's painful to watch Jamie Durnin (played by a tortured Christopher Denham) evolve into a liar like his father.

Jamie lies to his family, concealing that he's taken his father in. Jamie lies to his new girlfriend, Katie, telling her that his father died years ago and that she can't visit his apartment because of his roommate.

In O'Neill's hands

The confrontation scenes between Tom and each of the family members provide the stuff that Ibsen's melodramas are made of. Yet this play could have been even more powerful, had the character of Tom Durnin (played with detachment by David Morse) not been so relentlessly calculating, untrustworthy and completely unsympathetic.

Exclamations like "I want my family back!" or "I made a mistake!" aren't cries of contrition; they're demands of entitlement. Ultimately, we feel too little compassion for Tom and almost too much compassion for his victimized son, as Jamie struggles to confront his father.

The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin aspires to the ranks of great modern tragedies that dramatize the "sins of the fathers"— a universal theme traceable back to the Greeks, not to mention the Bible. In O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, James Tyrone destroys his sons Jamie and Edmund by his miserliness, ambition and recklessness (not to mention his alcoholism). In Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman, Willy Loman blindly chases the American Dream and in the process sacrifices his sons Biff and Happy along with himself.

And yet somehow James Tyrone and Wily Loman evoke in us the feelings of pity and fear that great tragedy requires. However moving Levenson's play may be, Tom Durnin ultimately leaves us cold.

Real-life suicide

If only we had seen Tom Durnin express a moment of true remorse and shame— if only we had seen him in a moment of "reversal and recognition," as Aristotle calls it— then we could suffer along with him.

Like James Tyrone and Willy Loman, Bernard Madoff had two sons. In December 2010, the second anniversary of Madoff's arrest, his older son Mark hung himself.

Bernard Madoff issued no comment. But I simply cannot imagine, as he heard the news in prison, that his heart didn't break.

Someone should find out, and then write that story. Only then will there be catharsis in the theater, and the possibility of redemption for the protagonist. That's a dramatic element more powerful than disappearance.♦


To read a follow-up commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.