'The Soap Myth' Explores Dueling Truths At SCC

In this era of rampant misinformation, who has the right to determine what’s true? Who gets to write history — or rewrite it for that matter?

Usually, it’s the victors. But what happens when people who are on the same side of history can’t agree on the truth?

That’s the crux of the debate explored in “The Soap Myth,” a 2009 play by Jeff Cohen that delves into a disturbing story that circulated widely in the aftermath of World War II: a story claiming that during the Holocaust, Nazis made soap from the corpses of murdered Jews.

It’s a longstanding — and real life — debate that has pitted historians, who say it never happened, against Holocaust survivors, who claim they bore witness.

From August 10 to 28, “The Soap Myth” is being presented at the Southampton Cultural Center in a staged production starring two-time Tony nominee Bob Gunton and directed by Emmy-nominated actor Harris Yulin, best known for his roles in the series “Fraser” and “Ozark.”

Set 50 years after the end of World War II, “The Soap Myth” tells the story of Holocaust survivor Milton Saltzman (Gunton), who has made it his late-in-life mission to convince historians that the Nazis did, indeed, produce soap from human corpses — something he claims to have witnessed firsthand.

He tells his story to a young journalist, Annie Blumberg (played by Maddie Rubin), who is assigned to write an article about Saltzman and his quest.

But Annie isn’t sure what to make of the tale. She struggles with her sympathy for Saltzman, on one hand, and the expertise of Holocaust scholars — played by Carolyn McCormick and John Rubinstein — on the other. These historians discount the word of eyewitnesses like Saltzman and, in the absence of real physical evidence, refuse to accept the “soap myth” as fact, because they are concerned the story will be weaponized by Holocaust deniers.

Though “The Soap Myth” is a work of fiction, as Cohen explained in a recent interview, it was inspired by true events. For the playwright, his entry into the world of the soap myth began as a mystery when a stranger handed him a manila envelope.

“I had a small Off-Off Broadway theater in the early aughts called the Tribeca Playhouse,” Cohen said. “After a performance, an elderly man came up to me and he said, ‘I like what you do here. You give free tickets to my senior center.’”

That’s when the man handed Cohen the envelope. “He said, ‘Look at this, maybe there’s something you can do with it,’” said Cohen. “And I never saw him again.”

Inside the envelope was a magazine called Moment, and contained within the pages of the magazine was an article called “Slippery History.” The article detailed the story of a man named Morris Spitzer who was on a crusade to get historians to acknowledge the truth of the soap myth.

“It’s a topic that I had never encountered before. I didn’t know what to do with it,” admitted Cohen, who said while it wasn’t his ambition to write a play about the Holocaust, when it arrived in his hands in the form of the article, he decided to explore where the theme would take him. “Even though, of course, I knew about the Holocaust and I knew certain things about the Holocaust, this issue of soap, and also this issue of the tension between historians and survivors, was new to me.

“So I had to learn about the history in order to write the play.”

Over the course of the next several years, Cohen worked in fits and starts as he figured out how to turn the material into a script.

“And then once I did, we did a workshop of it, and I saw that I’d gotten a lot of things wrong. So I rewrote it completely,” he said. “It was just one of those things that wouldn’t let me forget about it. It just kept haunting me until I made a play out of it.”

The play has been presented at several venues since 2009, and getting things right was of the utmost importance to Cohen for the same reason that Holocaust scholars dismiss the soap myth. The notion of playing into the hands of Holocaust deniers who were looking for any inconsistencies was definitely foremost in the playwright’s mind as he constructed “The Soap Myth.”

“The first thing that I realized was that in doing a play about the history of the Holocaust, I had to make sure that everything that’s in the play is accurate,” said Cohen. “So, for instance, I can’t make an assertion or put something in the play that would allow a Holocaust denier to say, ‘Well, the playwright got this wrong, so everything else in the play is wrong also.’ I had that responsibility, and that was really important.”

For that reason, part of Cohen’s script uses the actual transcripts from the Nuremberg trials, which focused on testimony related to the soap question.

“Then there’s a second part of the play, where the historian talks about a lot of the medical experiments that were done,” Cohen added. “And even though that’s not verbatim, there was a second Nuremberg trial, which not a lot of people know about, that only focused on the atrocities committed by the Nazi doctors.”

There’s also an aspect of the play that has to do with the volatility of the character of Milton Saltzman himself, a trait that illustrates the personal difficulty of being a survivor of an atrocity like the Holocaust.

“In my imagination, Milton Saltzman was a fairly successful and productive person after the war, and he pretty much buried his experience as far down in his psyche as he could,” said Cohen. “It’s like putting radioactive material in a lead box and just never looking at it again. Then, eventually, that poison, that radioactivity, that was his experience in the Holocaust, it leaks out and it’s taken him over.

“And so this sense of being listened to, and being heard and that his memories are not be denied, becomes an enormously powerful thing for him,” he added. “And sometimes when you are in your mid-70s, and going into your 80s, as we all know with parents and grandparents, sometimes you can’t reason with them. Sometimes they’re inappropriate. It’s something to do with their passion and everything else.”

Cohen explains that in his play, when historians say the Nazis “didn’t make soap,” what they’re really saying is that there is no concrete evidence that would allow them to add that detail to the history.

To Milton Saltzman, however, their denial is taken as a personal affront that negates his own lived experience.

“He talks about this in his last speech of the play, which has to do with the fact that he was told by the Nazis in the camp that when they allowed prisoners like him to take a shower, instead of gassing them, sometimes they said he was bathing with human soap,” said Cohen. “And that’s his experience. And it doesn’t matter whether or not it was human soap, or they were just telling him that.

“He’s not going to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t think that I’m really bathing with human soap,’” added Cohen. “This is what he was told, and this has haunted him for his entire life.

“As he says in the play, ‘Imagine that you are me. You clean yourself every day. You take a shower. You shampoo your hair.’ And just this simple thing of soap is something that always reminds him of his experience.

“That’s part of the real tragedy of it. It’s not something that he can escape. There’s nothing more basic and more, almost innocuous, than washing your hands or washing your face with soap. And yet this, for him, opens up this enormous amount of poison from his experience.”

Which for Cohen, raises the real question: How does an aging survivor ultimately survive in the face of such horrors — whether real or imagined?

“I think that’s a really fascinating thing. I don’t think of the play as a Holocaust play, because it doesn’t really take place in the 1940s. It takes place about 15 years ago, when I started writing it. And it really is about what the legacy of the Holocaust means for those who survived it,” said Cohen.

“I think it’s important for people to know that it’s not a horrifically gruesome play about the Holocaust. It really focuses more or less on this relationship that develops between this young Jewish journalist, Annie, and Milton, this cantankerous old Holocaust survivor — and she’s the one that finally gets to him — and the relationship that develops between them is very, very powerful and very emotional.”

For Harris Yulin, this is his first time directing a production at SCC, and it’s a piece of theater that he is looking forward to bringing to life on the Southampton stage.

“There are no proper villains in the play, unless someone sees the other side as villainous, which the main character Milton does. I think everyone has very valid arguments to make,” said Yulin. “I thought it was a pretty powerful piece of work and imminently doable, and so we’re doing it.

“It’s a spare kind of a bare-bones production, with very little paraphernalia. We have a platform and a number of chairs and couple of other items, which we add as we need, but there is nothing necessarily required. We’re choosing to do it in this way and we’ll see if it works,” he added.

“I’m so pleased with the cast. It’s a quartet of very interesting and accomplished people … people in theater know them well. And Maddie just got out of Carnegie Mellon — I believe it’s her first professional job. She’s quite something to see and hear.

“The Soap Myth” will be performed Wednesday through Sunday, August 10 to August 28, at the Southampton Cultural Center’s Levitas Center for the Arts, 25 Pond Lane, Southampton Village. Shows are at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, 5 p.m. on Sunday. Each performance includes a talkback with the playwright, cast and invited panelists. Tickets are $55 and $80 at scc-arts.org/the-soap-myth.

With additional reporting by Sophie Griffin.