By DORIS RUBENSTEIN
Six Points Theater is unquestionably a Jewish theater company. But it also prides itself on inclusivity; many of the performers, directors and back-office staff are not Jewish. But that is the beauty of professional theater: A good actor or director can transform their off-stage identity into a credible character who shares nothing with the real-life artist.
Six Points brings talented individuals who can climb over the Jewish cultural and historical barriers to create what promises to be great theater in its latest production, The Happiest Man on Earth, and its protagonist, Eddie Jaku.
Jaku died at the age of 101, in 2021, shortly after publishing his memoir with the same title. The book went on to be listed on the New York Times bestseller list.
Jaku’s memoir shares his journey as a young boy sent away by his parents in Leipzig to continue schooling as the Nazis take power, his survival in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and the building of a new life in Australia after World War II.
So, who are those involved in this very Jewish story, but aren’t Jewish themselves?
Playwright Mark St. Germain was not born Jewish. Still, among the subjects of his plays are Sigmund Freud and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. J.C. Cutler has a long résumé at Six Points (among his many and remarkable career stages) and clearly feels comfortable playing Jewish characters. This is a one-man show, so the challenge still is substantial. Barbara Brooks, the company’s founding artistic director, knows that Cutler is up to it.
One of the most important members of any production certainly is the director. Ben McGovern is new to Six Points, although he has been honing his craft for decades. The Minneapolis native first was exposed to theater as a student at South High School and early on picked up acting and directing cues by inserting himself wherever he could at the late, storied Theatre de la Jeune Lune. A short stint in the theater program at the University of Iowa convinced him that he’d get a better education by being intimately engaged in theater back in the Twin Cities. It paid off.
McGovern was involved in various capacities at theaters large and small, taking assistant and associate directing roles at the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio and working on the main stages there with such stars as Mark Rylance. He’s best known as the artistic director at Bloomington’s Artistry theater program, from 2015 through 2021.
As an individual and as a director, how does McGovern relate to the Holocaust story being brought to the stage in The Happiest Man on Earth?
Connecting to the performers and the audience is important to him. McGovern has directed solo performers numerous times and really likes the genre. While this is McGovern’s first time directing Cutler, they are old acquaintances. Working in backstage capacities, he’s seen Cutler in action.
“Watching an actor like J.C. develop a character in front of an audience is one of the best ways to get to know them,” he said. “This will be a good partnership.”
What really connects McGovern, and what he believes will connect the audience, to The Happiest Man on Earth is its timeliness. Reading the script for the first time, McGovern became acutely aware of the truth being told: This is a testament, a statement about a real person’s life. “It really came to me over the winter with the darkness growing day by day that what matters in life is bringing light, even in the darkest times, to our lives: things like kindness, a sense of humor, the idiosyncrasies that make us human.”
McGovern feels that many Americans like himself are feeling a darkness similar to what Jaku experienced in his youth in Germany. He commented that “over the past 70 years, we’ve been reminding people ‘never forget,’ yet it seems that people are still forgetting. We’re living at a time when masked men are in the streets, terrorizing people and literally breaking into citizens’ homes — without repercussions. … We feel hopeless about this. We have to remember what people did at another time when these same things were happening. It’s hard for us not to acknowledge that terrible things are happening in our streets.”
Eddie Jaku’s story doesn’t excuse the Germans who stood and watched what was happening to their neighbors. But justice took place at trials in Nuremberg and Israel, and he lived on to bring light wherever he went. We can all learn from Jaku, just as Ben McGovern has.
Jaku’s book is available at the St. Paul Public Library and can be sent to any library in the state through the MELSA system. You also can buy it through the publisher, HarperCollins, or at bookstores.
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Six Points Theater presents The Happiest Man on Earth, from Jan. 27 through Feb. 8. For information and tickets, go to sixpointstheater.org or call the box office at 651-647-4315. The theater is located in the Highland Park Community Center, 1978 Ford Pkwy., St. Paul.
(American Jewish World, Jan. 2026)
