WASHINGTON (DC)
The Washington City Paper
CHRIS KLIMEK JUL 6, 2017
Reality bites. In recent years, D.C. playgoers have seen fictionalized versions of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, closeted red-baiter (and paradoxically, Donald Trump mentor) Roy Cohn, and long-serving Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The Scalia drama, The Originalist, returns to Arena Stage on July 7.
But the night before that, the Capital Fringe Festival will host the premiere of another play about a powerful conservative whose departure was swift and surprising: Bernard “Barry” Freundel, the rabbi who led Georgetown’s Kesher Israel synagogue for 25 years before being arrested in 2014 for voyeurism.
Freundel was accused of making secret video recordings of women from his congregation as they undressed to use the mikvah, a ritual bath. Most of his victims were converts or students, women he was helping to shepherd into the faith. His primary device was a clock radio with a camera concealed inside. He edited the videos, organizing them and labeling them, as police discovered when they raided his residence and seized a dozen computers along with various portable storage drives. In 2015, Freundel pleaded guilty to filming 52 women without their knowledge, though some 100 additional victims were unable to press charges because the statute of limitations had expired. He was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison.
A.J. Campbell, 48, who was raised a Modern Orthodox Jew in Southern California before coming to D.C. in the early aughts, followed the case in the press obsessively. Having spent most of her career as a graphic artist, she’d been itching to take another run at playwriting, a pursuit she’d experimented with in her early twenties. Her early efforts are, she says now, “unwatchable.” Constructive Fictions, which imagines Freundel in his jail cell as he is visited by four women—composites of his victims—is her third play, and her first contribution to the Fringe Festival. It’ll be her first as an attendee, too, though she says she sees plays “as often as I can afford it.”
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