CALLBOARD: Memory, History, and the Holocaust

Cary Gitter, Playwright of The Steel Man

In early 2023, I was in search of a story. For a long time, I’d wanted to write a play that drew on my family’s Holocaust history. My late paternal grandmother, Eva, had lost her parents and siblings to a Nazi death squad in the city of Rovno, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine)—but she’d immigrated to America with my grandfather a decade before, so she had been the sole survivor.

The problem was that I didn’t know much more than that. As a child, whenever I’d attempted to ask my grandma about her family, she had always said just three terse words: “Hitler got them.” Her lips were sealed, the memories far too painful to revisit. So how could I write something truthful when all the details were unknown to me and buried forever?

I voiced this dilemma on the phone one evening with my frequent collaborator Joe Brancato, artistic director of Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point, New York. Without skipping a beat, Joe said, “I think you should talk to Sam Guncler.” 

Sam, it turned out, was a wonderful veteran New York actor whom Joe had worked with on a number of occasions over the years. Through those close collaborations, Joe had learned bits and pieces about Sam’s upbringing in Pennsylvania as the son of a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor. “He has some pretty incredible stories,” Joe told me.

Little did I know this was the beginning of what would become the most meaningful project of my career as a playwright. 

The first step was a Zoom call with Sam, who happens to be a uniquely lovely man as well as a deeply talented performer. The introduction went well; he and I hit it off. Then, with a grace and generosity that still astonishes me to this day, Sam agreed to let me interview him about his life. And that’s what I proceeded to do over the course of several riveting sessions.

Sam shared so much with me in those wide-ranging conversations: his experience growing up as the son of a survivor; his complex relationship with his father, who could be charming and ebullient one moment, then cruel and abusive the next; and Sam’s own lifelong struggle to navigate the generational trauma of the Holocaust. I listened, asked questions, and typed feverish notes, recording our Zoom meetings in case there was anything I failed to take down. 

After all that, Sam even invited me to visit him at the childhood home he still possesses in Pennsylvania. There, I walked through the rooms where the fraught domestic scenes I’d heard about had taken place. I stood in the backyard where Sam’s father had loved to garden because it reminded him of the farm he’d tended back in Hungary before the war. I absorbed it all and felt the living spirit of the past.

Now it was time to go away and write—to take Sam’s story and fictionalize it, to turn it into drama, to imbue it with my own imaginative impulses. I finished the first rough draft of The Steel Man in March 2023 and nervously sent it to Sam. His positive response was a huge relief and an enormous encouragement, and he gave me exactly the kind of hyper-specific feedback I needed, on everything from a Hungarian immigrant’s broken English to the nuanced psychology of the father-son dynamic. The sort of stuff you can only really know if you’ve lived it firsthand.

Oh, and here’s the most amazing part of all: Sam wasn’t just the inspiration for the play. He was also going to be in it, playing the Holocaust-haunted, revenge-obsessed father character, Leo Gellert. The layers of referentiality were dizzying. 

Joe, Sam, and I continued to develop the project from there, eventually enlisting a brilliant creative team and two other fantastic actors, Leighton Samuels and Amanda Kristin Nichols. Leighton portrays the son, Jake, who both loves and fears his father, while yearning to break free and build a life of his own. And Amanda plays Jake’s fiercely independent journalist girlfriend, Christine, who brings an outsider’s clarity to the heavy family baggage.

The play premiered at Penguin Rep just over two years ago, in the fall of 2024, and I was stunned by audience members’ visceral reactions. I watched people leave the theater in tears, whether because of their personal connection to the history in the piece or simply because they recognized the tight-knit, turbulent parent-child relationship. I felt honored and humbled to speak to them afterward and hear their stories.

I’m so grateful to be back at 59E59 with The Steel Man, and to share this production with New York audiences—with the original cast and creative team intact. I’m grateful to Joe Brancato for helping shape the show and shepherd it along, and for having the intuition to introduce me to Sam Guncler in the first place. 

Finally, I’m ever grateful to Sam, without whom this project would not exist. He trusted me; opened up to me with courage, honesty, and insight; and gave me the raw material with which to mold the play. He delivers a powerhouse performance as Leo—one of the most uncannily authentic I’ve ever seen. And perhaps most important, he gifted me an unexpected portal into my own family’s lost history—which, although it can never bring closure, does ultimately offer a luminous glimpse of healing and hope.

The Steel Man runs November 10 - December 13, 2026. Buy tickets here.

Header image: Sam Guncler in THE STEEL MAN. Photo by Dorice Arden Madronero.