CLEVELAND, Ohio – Without Ed Asner playing the lead role of Holocaust survivor Milton Saltzman, playwright Jeff Cohen’s “The Soap Myth” still would be a powerful exploration of memory, history and truth. With him?

Well, you could say it’s something quite a bit more. In fact, Cohen did say precisely that.

“One of the things I’m most grateful for is that, but for Ed Asner, this would just be a play,” Cohen said during a telephone interview. “Thanks to his courage, commitment and talent in taking this on and making this a priority, this story has been put into the zeitgeist. And that’s because he infuses this role with a ferocity that’s stunning.”

And how does Asner view “The Soap Myth,” which will be staged at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 4, at Case Western Reserve University’s Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center?

“It’s just a tremendous gift to be able to play this role and share this with audiences,” the seven-time Emmy winner said. “It’s a very emotional, beautifully written play. It’s pretty wonderful, and it’s an important subject.”

Asner, 89, plays a cantankerous survivor on a mission to have Holocaust museums include information on the Nazis making soap from the corpses of murdered Jewish victims. The play explores the friendship that develops between Saltzman and a young Jewish journalist, Annie Blumberg, who finds herself in a perplexing situation.

Annie, played by Liba Vaynberg, is torn between her sympathies for Saltzman and the views of many Holocaust scholars, who, despite a great deal of eyewitness testimony, refuse to go so far as treating the Nazi manufacture of soap as historical fact.

With another actress, Dee Pelletier, playing both Holocaust scholar Esther Feinman and Holocaust denier Benda Goodsen, Cohen’s play asks who has the right to write history: “those who have lived it and remember, those who study and protect it, or those who would seek to distort and desecrate its very existence.”

“This is a beleaguered elderly man,” Asner said. “It’s easy to imagine a man who suffered so intently in his youth now hearing that suffering totally invalidated, questioned and denied. Right after World War II, the world accepted that there was no crime so great for Hitler to have committed. Now we see the adjustments being made – an evil that would deny existence of the Holocaust.”

Asner has been touring in “The Soap Myth” in honor of Yom HaShoah, May 1, Holocaust Remembrance Day. There have been stops in Florida, Delaware, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Missouri. Broadway veteran Tovah Feldshuh, an Emmy nominee for her work in the miniseries “Holocaust,” played Feinman and Goodsen for the early part of this national tour. Pelletier, who originated the roles in the 2012 production at the Roundabout Black Box, takes over this week.

Seven-time Emmy winner Ed Asner has the lead role in playwright Jeff Cohen's "The Soap Myth."

Under the direction of Pam Berlin, the staged reading of Cohen’s play will leave Cleveland for performances in Columbus and Pittsburgh.

“What I found was that, while writing the play, I couldn’t take sides,” Cohen said. “I had to play it right down the middle. I couldn’t take the side of the survivor with the memory of soap over the historians who aren’t finding enough evidence of soap. But it’s not about whether or not they made soap. It’s really about whether the Holocaust will still be known about in 20 years or whether the deniers will be successful in wiping it out of history.”

Cohen, a director and producer who turned to writing “fairly late,” was not looking to the Holocaust as a subject for any of his plays. His “Soap Myth” journey started in 2002.

“I had small off-off-Broadway theater in Tribeca,” he said. “I did the box office, the tickets, the programs, the bathroom, you name it.”

After a performance, an elderly patron approached him with a vanilla envelope. “You give free tickets to my senior center,” he told Cohen, handing him the envelope. “I like what you do. Take a look at this. Maybe there’s something you can do.”

The man’s name was Morris Spitzer. Inside the envelope was a copy of magazine called Moments. Inside the magazine was an article by Josh Rolnick, “Slippery History,” about Spitzer, a Holocaust survivor.

“That was the first and last time I saw him,” Cohen said. “My family came from Russia at the turn of the last century, so I don’t have any familial connections to the Holocaust. So my knowledge of the Holocaust was fairly general. The material sent me on quite a journey. After a lot of false starts, it took a good seven years to come up with a workable draft of the play.”

The article about Morris Spitzer inspired the play about Milton Saltzman.

“Milton Saltzman is the living history in the play,” Cohen said. “Even if you can poke holes in a detail here or there, it’s irrelevant to the totality of his experience. Just the notion of instilling someone with the belief of human soap is something that will haunt this man just for the rest of his life.

“It’s brutally sad that there are people who want to deny the Nazis’ effort to exterminate a people. Soon, all the survivors will be gone. But theater is alive. Twenty years from now, 100 years now, when an actor plays Milton Saltzman, Milton Saltzman lives. There’s an immortality to that. Whenever Milton Saltzman lives on stage, he will not let people forget.”

Asner, best known for playing Lou Grant in both the CBS situation comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and the newspaper drama “Lou Grant,” first played Saltzman for a reading staged at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2016. He regularly has returned to the role ever since.

“I’m one of the luckiest people on Earth, because I get to spend an enormous amount of time with that man,” Cohen said. “I love him with all of my heart and soul, for his cantankerousness, his lovability, his energy, his talent, and his commitment.”

Indeed, age has done little to diminish the candor, energy and fire of the ever-outspoken Asner, whose film roles include Santa Claus in “Elf” and the voice of Carl Fredrickson in Pixar’s “Up.” He also is in the cast of “Dead to Me,” a Netflix comedy premiering Friday, May 3, and starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini.

“We live in a time when people deny facts, history and science, simply because they don’t like the history or the science,” Asner said. “It’s sad. It’s tragic. And it’s what makes this play so important, so timely and so timeless.”

PREVIEW

The Soap Myth

What: Ed Asner stars as a Holocaust survivor in the play by Jeff Cohen.

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 4

Where: Maltz Performing Arts Center, 1855 Ansel Rd, Cleveland

Tickets: $25-$65, call 216-368-6062 or visit case.edu/maltzcenter/