How heartbreaking that on World Holocaust Day 2017, a play about the suffering of Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust seems more relevant than ever. As the new administration has taken on the task of banning refugees and making the lives of non-white immigrants harder, it was quite hard to sit through Shmuel Refael’s Golgotha and not feel powerless. The monodrama performed in English by Victor Attar centers on the memories of Albert Salvado, a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family in a concentration camp, where he was also forced to work in the crematorium. When we first meet him, Albert is waiting to be called to light the torch at the Holocaust commemoration ceremony where he lives.

Yet as we learn about the horrors he survived and the immense pain he witnessed, we can’t help but ask ourselves an absolutely macabre question: is Albert actually better off alive? Golgotha, named after the site where Jesus was crucified, leads us to wonder about the difference between surviving and being alive. Is a life plagued by constant nightmares a desirable one? Refael has made sure there is no easy way out of the play’s moral and ethical conundrums, it’s a piece that will undoubtedly be rewarded by the conversations that follow it.

The one undeniable element is the power of Attar’s performance, rather than turning Albert into a theatrical cliché, or a flat out martyr, he infuses him with quirks and traits that make us recognize people we know within him. His sigh of relief as he washes his feet is both pleasurable and funny, his steady, but slow steps, another reminder of how much the character has lived, and how much an actor can do with actions rather than words. Attar is the kind of actor who can easily embody the earthy and the ethereal, at times giving Albert phantasmagorical qualities. If Golgotha was uncomfortable to sit through, it was certainly not due to the production lacking in anything, but rather how it made the world outside the theater feel absolutely inescapable.