THE SUBSTANCE OF FIRE
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Just how much you enjoy Apple Tree Theatre’s exceedingly well acted production of Jon Robin Baitz’s drama The Substance of Fire depends a great deal on whether you can accept its premises. The stockholders of an upscale, family-owned New York publishing house are thrown into bitter conflict when Holocaust survivor Isaac Geldhart decides to publish a six-volume work about Nazi atrocities instead of the titillating contemporary novel his pragmatic, business-minded son Aaron favors. Fearing that his father’s out-of-touch, intellectual tastes will bankrupt the company, Aaron persuades his brother Martin, a sickly landscape-architecture professor, and his sister Sarah, a children’s-television actress, to turn over to him their shares of company stock so he can wrest control from their father.
Layered atop this rather convoluted plot are more coincidences and hackneyed symbolism. The contemporary novel Isaac rejected happens to be the work of a man with whom Aaron had a clandestine homosexual fling. Isaac, incapable of love because of his wartime experiences, becomes obsessed with Hitler, even to the point of spending far more money than he could ever afford on a Hitler watercolor, which he burns at the end of the play, a symbol suggesting that he’s come to terms with his past.
