A new two-person play opening this week at Miami Beach's Colony Theatre digs into a little-known chapter of Mahatma Gandhi's life: his decades-long friendship with Hermann Kallenbach, a Lithuanian-born Jewish architect who became his closest companion, housemate, and benefactor in South Africa. Gandhi and the Jew, written by Harley Elias, runs November 5 through 29 and marks the world premiere production from Miami New Drama, kicking off the company's 10th anniversary season.
According to Miami New Drama, the play is drawn from years of research, multiple journeys to South Africa, and hundreds of unpublished letters. That correspondence has real historical weight: the Kallenbach family archive holds roughly five decades of letters between Gandhi and Kallenbach dating from 1905 to 1945, much of it never published, according to the BBC. The play begins before Gandhi became an international icon, when he was still a young attorney confronting injustice, while Kallenbach is portrayed as a successful architect searching for something beyond his comfortable life.
A Friendship That Shaped a Philosophy
Gandhi and Kallenbach forged what the production describes as an extraordinary friendship, one that helped shape Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. That bond was later tested by conflicting convictions as Nazism rose in Europe, with Kallenbach increasingly supporting Jewish self-determination even as his closest friend charted a different path. The play explores identity, violence, survival, and the limits of personal conviction, according to Miami's Community Newspapers.
The cast is a two-hander: Keshav Moodliar, a Juilliard School Drama Division graduate born in India, plays Gandhi, while Max Katz, trained at Drama Centre London and Moscow's Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute, plays Kallenbach. The decades-long friendship between the two men stars at the center of the show, as TheaterMania reported when the full cast and creative team were announced. Margot Bordelon directs, marking her third world premiere collaboration with Miami New Drama, and the show is also the fifth time the company has worked with playwright Harley Elias.
Previews, Pricing And Where To See It
Preview performances are set for Thursday and Friday this week at 8 p.m., with preview tickets priced at $45 before later increases, according to the Miami Living Magazine. Tickets are available online and at the Colony Theatre box office at 1040 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, per Miami's Community Newspapers. The production's creative team includes Justin Swader and Christopher Swader for scenic design, Beth Goldenberg for costume design, Oliver Wason for lighting design, and Sinan Zafar for sound design, with Tara Rubin serving as casting director and Katie Wilhelm as stage manager.
Miami New Drama has founding artistic director Michel Hausmann and managing director Claudia Campos, and the company was co-founded by Hausmann and Moisés Kaufman in 2014 and has produced 22 world premieres. Hausmann said he was thrilled to open the company's landmark 10th anniversary season with Gandhi and the Jew, while Bordelon said she hoped audiences would fall in love with the story regardless of their background or connection to its history.
Third Entry In The Jewish Play Initiative
Gandhi and the Jew is the third commissioned premiere in Miami New Drama's Jewish Play Initiative, which the company says develops new plays about Jewish life, history, and identity. The initiative was created after October 7th, the company's leadership has said, per the same TheaterMania report. In 2025, Miami New Drama commissioned and produced Jonathan Spector's Birthright, then followed it with the world premiere of S. Asher Gelman's The Zionists.
The company's track record with Jewish-themed work extends further back. Miami New Drama and Tectonic Theater Project first began developing Here There Are Blueberries in Miami in 2017, and the show was workshopped there again in 2018, according to the New York Times. That play, about a trove of Nazi photographs, went on to become a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama, the Miami Herald reported, and Miami New Drama is a co-producer on its Broadway production, which the Times reports was scheduled to begin previews November 2 and open November 9 for a 10-week run at the Barrymore Theater in New York.
