HANNAH, MARTIN AND HITLER

Early in "Hannah and Martin," a new play about the 20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the audience at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre learns it's just a few handshakes away from Hitler.

"Hitler has blood on his hands, yes?" says Hannah in a flashback to a Nuremberg hotel room in 1946. "He shook hands with Himmler. Who shook hands with the minister of education. Who shook hands with Professor Martin Heidegger. Who shooks hands with me."

That makes four degrees of separation. If you continue to count, Kate Fodor, who wrote the play, makes five; and being in the audience watching it makes six. At any rate, as Hannah puts it later in the play, her dilemma is this: "If the hand you take is one stretched out for help, what then? A sin to take it? Or a sin to refuse?"

The handshakes are symbolic, of course, even if they were literal. A lot more than polite greetings are at stake. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 (the year Hitler came to power and Arendt, who was Jewish, fled Germany to the United States). He was appointed rector of the University of Freiburg and regarded Hitler as Germany's savior. Whatever doubts Heidegger may have had then and later -- he resigned as rector in 1934 because of faculty and party disagreements -- he never publicly apologized for his association with the Nazis.

This is the historical template for Fodor's play, which is based on well-known facts and on lesser-known evidence discovered in Arendt's letters (unsealed in 1995) that she did more than shake Heidegger's hand. As his student in the 1920s, overawed by his intellect, she briefly became his lover. And the affair continued long after, by mail.

The play's seduction scene is credible, the imagined bedding plausible (even allowing for the apple she brings him). David Strathairn, as the man who shook the hand who shook the hand, cuts a more conceivable figure as a Casanova in the bedroom than he does as a scholar in the classroom. And I have no quarrel with Melissa Friedman's portrait of the nervous, nervy, chain-smoking grad student in thrall to the professor ("He taught me how to think!")

But if Straithairn is Martin Heidegger, I'm Martin Buber. Not to lay everything on a fine actor who's simply miscast, but ... if you don't believe Straithairn is Heidegger, then it's pretty hard to believe in the rest of the play or the production.

Hannah's dilemma presents itself after the war. As a writer for The New Yorker, she has come to Nuremberg to cover the war crimes trial of Hitler Youth leader Baldur Von Schirach. While in Germany, she feels obliged to see Heidegger who, at her urging and that of others, has been stripped of his professorship and deprived of the right to teach.

When she and Heidegger confront each other, he tells her: "I never advocated violence! Not physical violence. Perhaps an intellectual violence." He rhapsodizes: "Do you know what Hitler said that first caught my attention? He said that all great ages seek bridges to the heroic past. How could I have resisted that? I wanted to set a clarifying fire that would burn away the weak and corrupted and the inconsequential thinking with which history is littered."

Hannah demurs: "It was so clear what Hitler was from the beginning. I think any second-year graduate student would have slammed the door in his face if Heidegger hadn't been standing there next to him."

The great thinker still won't give up on Hitler. "He was very close, Hannah," Martin says. "He got it wrong, but he was very close."

The two of them go on like that until Hannah finally says: "You are a sort of murderer, I think." To which, stiff-necked as ever (but now wounded), Martin replies: "I am a scholar!"

Which must have done the trick. Because Hannah has a change of heart and decides to write a letter asking the authorities to restore Heidegger to the faculty so he may continue to teach. Despite much to-ing and fro-ing about the letter with her conscience-stricken assistant, who refuses to type it for her, Hannah finally manages to get the thing down on paper. And so Hannah's dilemma is settled, if not solved, at least to the extent that she has acted upon her conviction: Hell, Martin made a colossal mistake, but students shouldn't be made to suffer for it by depriving them of his lectures.

Let's not blame the messenger for the message, however. Arendt did in fact come to Heidegger's defense. Fodor's fictionalized dramatization doesn't do justice to the subject not because it delivers the wrong message but because the message hasn't been fleshed out. Martin and Hannah are daytime tube-worthy mouthpieces portentously debating issues well beyond their capacities, notwithstanding Friedman's vivid efforts to invest Hannah with human, if Katharine Hepburn-like, qualities.

While the issues overshadow the two chief debaters, it is the supporting characters and players, ironically, who lend "Hannah and Martin" a tangible sense of reality: George Morfogen especially (as the kindly, principled Karl Jaspers), Laura Hicks (as Heidegger's Nazified wife, the chilling, loyal martinet Elfride) and Sandra Shipley (as Gertrude Jaspers, the wife with touching common sense).

"Hannah and Martin," a presentation of the Epic Theatre Center, runs through April 15 at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, 55 Mercer St. (in Soho), Manhattan, N.Y. Tickets may be purchased online via Ticket Central.

Selected evenings feature post-performance discussions. Thursday's panel of experts: Joanna Scott, author of "Hannah Arendt Discovers America," David Kettler, scholar in residence at Bard College and author of "Political Theory and the Hitler Regime", and Alan Rosenberg, professor of philosophy at Queens College and author of "Heidegger and the Holocaust."