Miami Beach gets the first look at Gandhi and the Jew, a new two-hander by Harley Elias that opens Miami New Drama’s tenth-anniversary season on November 5. Keshav Moodliar plays Gandhi and Max Katz plays his friend Hermann Kallenbach in the world premiere, which runs through November 29.
The play starts in South Africa, long before Gandhi was a world figure. Elias built it from years of research, travel and hundreds of unpublished letters, and finds Gandhi as a young attorney looking for a way to confront injustice. Kallenbach is a successful Lithuanian-born Jewish architect who wants more than the comfortable life he has made. He became Gandhi’s closest companion, his housemate and his benefactor, and the two worked out the ideas behind Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence together. Decades later, with Nazism rising in Europe and Kallenbach increasingly committed to Jewish self-determination, those convictions put the friendship to its hardest test.
Moodliar, who was born in India and graduated from the Drama Division at The Juilliard School, most recently played the title role in Don Juan with Molière in the Park, after a season at Hudson Valley Shakespeare as Orlando in As You Like It and Edmund in King Lear. Katz, a native New Yorker who trained at Drama Centre London and at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow, was most recently seen in Death of a Salesman at Hartford Stage and in Try/Step/Trip, a three-time Drama Desk nominee, at the Under the Radar festival.
Margot Bordelon directs, her third world premiere with the company. Scenic design is by Justin Swader and Christopher Swader, costumes by Beth Goldenberg, lighting by Oliver Wason and sound by Sinan Zafar. Casting is by Tara Rubin, and Katie Wilhelm is the stage manager.
This is the fifth time Miami New Drama has worked with Elias, and the play is the third commission from the company’s Jewish Play Initiative, which develops new plays about Jewish life, history and identity. The first, Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, went on to a sold-out, extended Off-Broadway run at MCC Theater; the second, The Zionists, premiered in April 2026 and moved on to Barrington Stage. The New York Times has already picked Gandhi and the Jew as one of the shows to see around the country this fall.
“I am thrilled to open our landmark 10th anniversary season with Gandhi and the Jew, a revelatory exploration of a little-known chapter of history that speaks directly to some of the most urgent questions of our time: identity, violence, survival, and the limits of our convictions,” said Michel Hausmann, the company’s founding artistic director.
“Every one of us has our own complicated relationship with identity and belonging,” said Elias. “Here are two people who engaged as deeply as they could with theirs, who argued passionately over a lifetime, searching for truth and imagining a future that recognized every part of their humanity.”
Bordelon described the writing as taking on “one of the most charged debates of our time” and giving “both sides its full force,” by putting the argument in the mouths of two men who love each other.
The Miami opening lands two days before another Miami New Drama title arrives on Broadway. Here There Are Blueberries, first staged as a workshop production at the company in 2016, opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on November 9, with Miami New Drama among its co-producers; Michael Cerveris and Kathleen Chalfant lead that cast.
Gandhi and the Jew plays November 5–29, 2026. Tickets are available from Miami New Drama and at the Colony Theatre box office, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach.
