August 6, 2020

In the current absence of live theater, the West Coast Jewish Theater (WCJT) is filling the void by mining its vault of filmed past performances and presenting them online for free. The first of these is “Fugu,” which was staged at the Pico Playhouse in 2017. 

Directed and produced by Howard Teichman who co-wrote it with Steven G. Simon, the play is based on the little-known history of how Japan sheltered 6,000 Lithuanian Jewish refugees in the city of Kobe, to protect them from the Nazis. 

The Jewish community thrived for a while, until Gestapo Col. Josef Meisinger, aka The Butcher of Warsaw, ordered their extermination — and Japan’s Foreign Affairs Minister Norihiro Yasue’s efforts to prevent it.

The story also involves a scheme called the Fugu Plan, devised by Yasue to convince Americans of their benevolent, peaceful intentions by sending Jewish community leader Avram Kaufman to the United States on a goodwill mission. There’s also a star-crossed romance between the minister’s aide, Setsuzo Kotsuji, and Kaufman’s daughter, Sarah.

Teichman, the artistic director of the WCJT, first heard talk of Jewish refugees in Japan and Shanghai at a Passover seder in 1992. Intrigued, he did some research and read about the Fugu Plan, which ultimately didn’t come to fruition, but Yasue succeeded in saving the Jews’ lives by sending them to a ghetto in Shanghai, where they lived until the end of World War II. 

“We are seeing the rise of Fascism played out in front of us, in Portland and other places. History keeps repeating itself because we don’t learn from it. People today are losing their moral compass. We have to stand up and speak out.” — Howard Teichman

Starting in 1994, the playwrights began writing while doing further research, including interviews with survivors and visits to Little Tokyo and the Japanese American National Museum. More than two decades later, after a couple of staged readings in New York and Los Angeles, “Fugu” had its world premiere in January 2017.

The play opens with a kimono-clad Japanese woman doing a traditional fan dance and a Chasidic man dancing separately and with her. “It was a way of bridging the two cultures through dance and music,” Teichman said. “It gives the audience a chance to see these cultures in a new way.

“The basic concept of the play is communication,” he continued, and the use of multiple languages — English, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese — underscores that point. Teichman hired a professor from USC as a consultant who spoke the prewar traditional form of Japanese, to ensure that it was historically correct.

Most of “Fugu’s” characters are based on real people, but the character of Sarah Kaufman and an older woman, Ida Dovitch, are inventions. “I did take dramatic license with the women,” Teichman said. “We created Sarah because we wanted to create a romance between two characters from different cultures to show how similar they are.”

At the play’s end, the audience learns what became of the characters. Surprisingly, Kotsuji converted to Judaism and is buried in the same cemetery as Oskar Schindler in Israel. Meisinger stood trial in Poland and was executed for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. Yasue was captured by the Soviets and died in a labor camp. “He was a religious, moral man who knew right from wrong and stood up for his values,” Teichman said.

He believes that the play’s themes are more relevant than ever in today’s America. “Fascism can rear its ugly head at any time,” he said. “We are seeing the rise of Fascism played out in front of us, in Portland and other places. History keeps repeating itself because we don’t learn from it. People today are losing their moral compass. We have to stand up and speak out.”

The son of a Polish survivor of the Majdanek concentration camp who made his way to Toronto after the war to join his sisters, Teichman recalled the impact of the Holocaust on his family. “My father was always haunted by what happened to him. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to be involved in Jewish theater,” he said. “A lot of the people who survived the camps no longer believed in God and don’t practice the religion, but it wasn’t God that did this. It was man’s inhumanity to man.” 

Teichman’s love of theater traces back to the third grade, when he’d entertain the classroom with little skits. “The teacher would give me five minutes to improvise something. Sometimes I’d get other kids involved,” he said. He got further improvisational training and learned how to write plays at Second City in Chicago, alongside future “Saturday Night Live” stars Bill Murray and Jim Belushi, and earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in theater at UCLA.  

He has been affiliated with the WCJT since he directed “The Value of Names” in 2009. “I wanted to do Jewish theater because I wanted my children to know what it means to be Jewish,” he said. “I’ve always been committed and dedicated to bringing Jewish theater to my audience and I’ll do it till the day I die.”

Although productions are on indefinite hold because of COVID-19, Teichman is writing a new play, a comedy called “Three Coconuts.” “I’m trying to focus on laughing as much as I can. We know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and we’ll be able to come back.” He recently became a grandfather for the second time, and in-person and FaceTime family visits keep him going during the pandemic.

He believes that “Fugu” has a hopeful message. “Despite something as horrible as World War II and as manipulative as this Fugu Plan that the Japanese were trying to do, 6,000 lives were saved,” he said. “Something good came out of something bad. Tikkun olam happens when you least expect it.”

“Fugu” is available on YouTube here.