Theatre J takes on superheroes in general in its latest production, David Bar Katz’s “The History of Invulnerability.” More specifically, it takes on Superman and his creators, Jerry Siegel (David Deblinger) and artist Joe Shuster (David Raphaely).
Bar Katz’s play is at once very serious and very funny. He shows Jerry as a young boy (Noah Chiet) only briefly; then Siegel is a grown-up. As he sits in an armchair, Siegel imagines an extraordinary superbeing: an 8 feet high shadow appears, lit from behind, on a curtain near Siegel’s armchair. Then Superman (Tim Getman) steps out from behind the curtain, in full Superman regalia.
Then it’s Cleveland, late 1930s. Siegel and Shuster mail their comic to the offices of National Periodical Publications and the rest is history. But as Bar Katz tells it, it’s not all a happy history. A great deal of “History of Invulnerability” is extremely disheartening.
We learn that once they cashed their first meager check, Siegel and Shuster were forced to sign away their valuable rights to Superman, a situation that changed only years later after a huge lawsuit. We learn that Siegel thought of Superman as his son, in fact neglecting his real son.
| Onstage |
| ‘The History of Invulnerability’ |
| Where: Theater J, 1529 16th St. NW |
| When: Through July 8 |
| Info: Tickets start at $30; 800-494-TIXS; theaterj.org |
The majority of the story of “Invulnerability” is Siegel’s and Deblinger is powerful as the compact, intense writer, whose imagination never stopped working. Raphaely is credible as the less flamboyant Shuster, a man so determined to make Superman perfect that he cut his own arm to get the right color of blood red for Superman’s cape and shorts.
Jjana Valentiner is excellent in several roles, including Sarah Siegel and Josette Frank. This play includes appearances by men of the time. Thornton Wilder and Lucky Luciano are both portrayed well by James Whalen. When Siegel runs into Wilder in a bar, he’s talking to Elia Kazan (Brandon McCoy). The local color helps ground the play in a sense of place and time.
Although Siegel’s relation to Superman inexplicably waffles from love to anger over time (sometimes he’s the doting father, sometimes the picky artist), one thing never alters in Siegel’s conscience: what is happening in Europe, the Nazi oppression, the concentration camps, the gas chambers. Bar Katz creates very literal scenes of life in Birkenau, a subtext that tortures Siegel, who is at first not allowed to depict Superman slaughtering Nazis.
It is that counterpoint that makes “The History of Invulnerability” more than just a biographical record of a cartoonist’s successes and failures. Bar Katz’s “History of Invulnerability” is ultimately intriguing precisely because it doesn’t sit within one style. Directed by Shirley Serotsky, it mingles realism with the surreal, superheroism with ordinariness and the funny with the unbearably horrific.
