Anonymous Young Man 1
An eyewitness to the fatal traffic accident which is the stimulus for the origin of this play. This young dreadlocked Caribbean-American insists that the Hasidic Jewish man driving was obviously drunk.
Gavin Cato
Gavin Cato is the Guyanan father of the young boy killed when the driver lost control of his car. What frustrates him most is the sense that justice has been denied because the Jewish community is in control of Crown Heights.
Richard Green
A community activist whose monologue seeks to make people understand that the black youth responsible for murdering an entirely different Hasidic Jew while taunting him with shouts of “Heil Hitler” don’t even have a clue who Hitler was. In fact, they don’t even know any black leader except for Malcolm X.
Michael Miller
The Executive Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council insists that a streak of anti-Jewish bias runs permanently through the black community of Crown Heights and this streak is unbounded. He also insists that the Jewish community offered condolences to Mr. Cato, the condolences were reciprocated by the black community in response to the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum.
Rabbi Joseph Spielman
Represented as a spokesperson for the Hasidic sect to which the driver of the car belonged, Spielman offers the first actual accounting of the facts of the incident. Notably, he was not actually there. More notably, his account is substantially different from eyewitness testimony.
Norman Rosenbaum
Brother of the man murdered because he was a Hasidic Jew—who had no connection to the car accident at all—Norman Rosenbaum has two different monologues that occur back to back. In his first monologue he asserts that a miracle occurred that fateful day: his brother was the only Jew killed just for being a Jew. The second recounts how he had just arrived back at his office when he got an urgent message from his wife telling him to come home right away and how he then learned about the murder of his brother thousands of miles and sixteen time zones away.
