Madoff, of course, has not ended his life. But he is destined to spend what remains of it in jail, an appropriate way-station on the road to the hell he so richly deserves. The published accounts of his apparent indifference to the emotional pain and financial suffering he caused trusting friends, mostly Jewish investors, and innocent bystanders in his quest for—what?—resonate throughout the words and deeds that Rattigan wrote for his play’s anti-hero, Gregor Antonescu, a Depression-era Romanian-born crook and con man, brilliantly interpreted in a new Broadway production by Frank Langella.

It’s easy to see why the Roundabout Theatre Company thought the moment had come for a revival of this creaky drama, originally performed in 1963, a decade or two after Rattigan’s best work had been written. The company’s bet on this lesser play is vindicated thanks mainly to the astonishing Langella, whose riveting, flawless performance almost gives depth and definition to a character who lacks both. Why anyone at all should love such a driven, egomaniacal monster is a mystery that Rattigan does not even attempt to resolve (just as recent books and the 60 Minutes interviews of Madoff’s wife and surviving son do little to explain how such an evil man could successfully impress others as a loving father and a respected member of his community). But Langella’s silky villainy makes him irresistibly charismatic to the audience and those destined to be manipulated and betrayed by him—namely, almost everyone in the play.

Nobody but nobody plays bad as well as Langella. I’ve been devoted to him ever since he seduced Kate Nelligan (Lucy Seward) in John Badham’s 1979 film version of Dracula. His sexy, sultry vampire was magnetic, making the prospect of feasting on humans and an eternity of night-life clubbing almost alluring. Then came his portrayal of the disgraced president in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, another theatrical villain to whom he gave not just jowls but complexity and a sort of grandeur. But Langella has a tougher challenge in Antonescu, another variety of vampire who preys on the financial blood of the living. Rattigan has written him as a stick figure—a “Romanian-born radio and oil king” whose motto for financial survival is “confidence and liquidity.” Unable to love—it’s a “commodity I can’t afford,” Antonescu says—he is hard to empathize with, or even to hate. But Langella performs the impossible: He makes an audience unable to stop watching him.

The play revolves around Gregor’s desperate effort to save his financial empire by using his illegitimate son to help persuade a potential merger target, American industrialist Mark Herries (expertly played by Zach Grenier), not to abandon the planned deal upon which his solvency depends. Herries, like the late author, has an inconvenient secret: He is gay, or “queer,” an old-fashioned word uttered in another context by Gregor’s son’s girlfriend, Carol Penn (the able Virginia Kull, who struggles mightily with a poorly drawn character). So, Gregor’s plan is to use his son, who calls himself Basil Anthony, by introducing him to Herries not as his offspring, but as sexual bait. In the course of this play-within-a-play, Gregor suggests to Herries that he, too, is similarly inclined and that Basil just might be available to Herries if the price is right—that is, if the merger goes through.

Gregor, however, has a problem: He hasn’t seen Basil since a quarrel five years earlier that seems to have involved a revolver, a half-hearted effort by Basil to shoot his ruthless father, and a subsequent escape to New York to tend bar, play music, and flirt with “goddamn Bolshie” politics.

After dropping in virtually unannounced on Basil in his meticulously depicted, grungy Greenwich Village basement flat and begging for his help, Gregor fails to clue him in on his precise intended role in this financial rescue scheme. Basil (Adam Driver) is furious and crushed when he finally understands how his father has used him—obviously not for the first time. Throughout the play, Basil, as weak as his father is ruthless, struggles with his instinctive devotion to a man he knows is evil and whom in a particularly compelling moment of the play he denounces as “nothing.”

By the play’s end, Gregor is very much alone. His elegantly transactional former stripper of a wife (Francesca Faridany), grandly attired and perfectly coiffed, a “countess” whose title has also been bought and paid for, abandons him to his fate. So too does his efficient, self-serving factotum, an omnipresent right-hand man and enabler named Sven Johnson (played by Michael Siberry, who in his own smaller role is as compelling, perplexing, and chilling a character as his boss).

Crisply directed by the Tricycle Theatre’s Maria Aitken, Man and Boy may not be a great play. But thanks to the extraordinary Langella and a strong supporting cast, it is superb theater. After they’ve stopped watching re-runs of Ruth Madoff’s treakly performance on 60 Minutes, the Madoff family should go see it.

• Ruth Madoff revealed that soon after her husband’s Ponzi scheme was revealed, the two tried to commit suicide by taking copious amounts of Ambien. [NYT]

• Israeli earthquake aid has begun to arrive in Turkey. Turkish officials have assured the world that while they appreciate it, the two countries are still—don’t worry!—in a diplomatic chill. [NYT]

• In addition to the 25 Israeli prisoners, Egypt also scored an F-16 (for sale) from the United States as part of the deal for the Israeli-American alleged spy Ilan Grapel, who is set to be freed later today. [JPost]

• Information about secret peace talks in 2008, newly revealed in Condoleezza Rice’s memoir, show that a deal was close and that the Obama Administration screwed up by coming in and focusing on settlements, David Ignatius argues. [WP]

• The U.S. ambassador urged the Israelis to institute a partial settlement construction freeze in order to bolster U.S. moves against Palestinian U.N. membership. [Ynet]

• The U.S. State Department chastised Israel over its announcement of new building in the settlement of Ariel. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Twilight actress Kristen Stewart, apparently not a Jew, nonetheless got her start singing “a more serious dreidel song” (which is to say, presumably not the “I made it out of clay” one). [W]

• Splitsville for the Madoffs. [JTA]

• The U.S. military has learned several counterinsurgency tactics from the Israelis. [Abu Muqawama]

• Camp Be’chol Lashon, in Marin County, California, is specifically for Jews of color. [NYT]

Amy Winehouse made out of pills? Amy Winehouse made out of pills.

Followers of a Mystical Religion Were Taken in by Madoff Scheme [Boston Globe]

From then on, the Alpern and Madoff families, and business interests, became intertwined. Bernie graduated from Hofstra in 1960 and was casting about for moneymaking opportunities. Ruth’s father, a certified public accountant whose firm, Alpern & Heller, had been in business since 1948, provided the umbrella for Bernie to launch his market-making operation, buying and selling securities for other companies. Bernie quietly began an investment fund on the side, and two of Saul Alpern’s employees—the accountants Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes—started to work for him, funneling investors who wanted to get in on what were known even back then as Bernie’s guaranteed returns of 13.5 to 20 percent a year.

His earliest investors were friends of Ruth’s parents, retired teachers, accountants, and lawyers who’d sold their houses in Queens, moved down south, and had some extra money to put away. Many of them spent their summers in the bungalow colonies of the Catskills in upstate New York. “My hotel catered to retired people from Florida, my parents’ friends,” says Cynthia Arenson, a classmate of Ruth’s who ran the Sunny Oaks resort near Woodridge and whose parents were best friends with Ruth’s parents. “Thirty percent of my hotel invested in Bernie Madoff.”

Which probably means, if nothing else, that you can get a good rate at Sunny Hill this summer.

Poor Ruth [New York]