Cherry Docs

photo: Caleb Levengood

A neo-Nazi skinhead, soon to stand trial for a brutal hate crime, is defended by a liberal Jewish legal aid lawyer in this two-hander written and directed by David Gow. Surprisingly, the play doesn't delve very deeply into questions of legal ethics, but it's otherwise by-the-numbers and easy to predict. What elevates it a bit above its disappointingly pat plotting is that Gow has written these two characters credibly and he's given them a lot of solid dialogue; he's also paced and directed the play sensibly so that the characters' confrontations are suitably taut and dynamic. He's fortunate that his two actors - Maximilian Osinski as the skinhead and Mark Zeisler as the lawyer - both give strong, emotionally intense performances that hold the attention even when the play is at its most formulaic.