The Artful Jurist

People, people, people...  Yes, putting real people into your play can stir up a world of trouble.  Case in point...

You'd expect someone teaching theater studies at Yale to know a little more than a thing or two about plays.  But apparently Associate Professor Deborah Margolin didn't know when she wrote the original version of her drama about convicted ponzi scheme artist Bernard Madoff, Imagining Madoff, that one of the people depicted in her play would threaten legal action.  And guess what?  The threatening party wasn't Mr. Madoff.  It was Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who, with his wife, lost his life savings to Mr. Madoff's scheme.

Mr. Wiesel was depicted as a major character in Ms. Margolin's original version of the play.  According to reports, Mr. Wiesel was not pleased with the depiction, calling the play "obscene" and "defamatory."

Threats of potential litigation caused Theater J in Washington, D.C., to pull the plug last year on its originally scheduled premiere of the play.  But now it's back at Theater J, opening yesterday -- only this time Ms. Margolin has done a bit of re-imagining, having taken Mr. Wiesel out of the play and substituted a fictitious Holocaust survivor and Madoff victim named Solomon Galkin.  An electronic publicity material I received regarding the production made certain to note that, due to legal issues, the play had been rewritten to take Mr. Wiesel out of it.

My understanding is that, although the character's name has been changed, much of his dialogue hasn't.  That leaves open the possibility that Ms. Margolin might not be completely out of the woods legally if Mr. Wiesel were to believe the Galkin character is just a thinly disguised version of himself.  Defamation laws can extend even to "fictionalizations" where everyone knows who the mysterious "Mr. X" really is.