The Pawnbroker
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Now, in 1958, he plies his pawnbroking trade in Harlem, performing by rote in a bleak cagelike structure. Here he encounters lost souls whose lives resemble those of prisoners in a work camp–particularly the prostitutes. Their plights trigger tormented memories of his wife, Ruth, who was used as a sex slave by Nazi soldiers. Fifteen years later, though ostensibly free, Sol remains a slave–to the police, whose protection he requires, and to his boss, the gun-toting Murillio. This shady businessman runs both the pawn trade in Harlem and a brothel–and threatens to have Sol murdered if he tries to get out of the pawnshop racket. A well-meaning solicitor from a neighborhood volunteer organization offers Sol the possibility of friendship or romance, but it seems unlikely he’ll have any real respite from his misery. So when Sol’s assistant, Jesus Ortiz, plots with another hooligan to rob the pawnshop, we don’t even fear much for Sol’s safety–we suspect that, after all he’s been through, a robbery would be trivial. And even if matters turned violent, it seems Sol’s death would come as a relief to him.
This is unrelentingly grim material, mitigated only by Sol’s occasional wry observations and by the eccentric characters who do business with him, bringing him their prized possessions–their bronzed baby shoes, their butterfly collections, their musical instruments, their silverware, their junk, all the things they’ve gotten by legitimate and illegitimate means. Sol likens his role to that of the neighborhood priest–confessions arrive in the guise of stolen merchandise, and the pawnbroker gives absolution in cash. Moreover, Sol’s business does as much good to his neighborhood as his faith did for him in the Nazi concentration camps. The phrases “Trust nothing” and “Trust nobody” have become his personal mantras.
The set does have one serious deficiency: the designers have failed to mask the entrances and exits to the stage, so one can sometimes see the actors scurrying around backstage between scenes–and the drama of a flashback to the concentration camps is undercut by a glimpse beforehand of someone in a Nazi uniform wandering around behind the scenes and a camp victim dashing for a costume change. A second “deficiency” is the startling trio of images that begins the show and outshines everything else in it. Behind the cage we see concentration camp victims pressed against one another, straining to get out. A lighting shift transforms the cage into a New York commuter train where passengers jostle one another, waiting impatiently for their stop. Another lighting change and the cage becomes Nazerman’s pawnshop. These transformations take only a matter of seconds, but they capture wordlessly and with pinpoint accuracy the nature of Nazerman’s plight. Some affecting moments follow this sequence, but nothing approaches its eloquence or power.
