What does survival demand of those who return—and of those who helped bring them home?
In his Off-Broadway debut, Aftermath, David Zax transforms a journalist’s return from captivity into an intimate, unsettling reckoning with heroism, privilege, and the hidden costs of survival.
Zax began his career as a journalist, contributing to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Smithsonian Magazine before turning to playwriting and screenwriting. A former writing fellow at The Playwrights Realm, he also wrote The Room Where I Was Held, featured in the INK’D Festival of New Plays. In Aftermath, a freelance journalist struggles to rebuild his life after being kidnapped by the Taliban.
Photo Credit: Marc J. Franklin
Danny Kornfeld plays Josh Goldman, a young journalist who returns from captivity to his family’s affluent Washington, D.C., neighborhood. After enduring kidnapping, torture, and bombings in Afghanistan, Josh feels alienated from a world where the most immediate threat seems to be an aggressive Bichon Frise. Kornfeld, who made his Broadway debut as Young Rabbi in Harmony, offers a compelling portrait of a man torn between trauma, conviction, and family conflict.
Josh believes his father, Alan Goldman, traded his antiwar ideals for the rewards of a lobbying career. Alan sees it differently: he accepted golden handcuffs to provide for his family. Tony-nominated stage and screen actor Steven Skybell brings weight and nuance to a father confronting his son’s judgment and the secrets surrounding the kidnapping.
Jill Stern portrays Josh’s mother with warmth and restraint, capturing a caring woman’s struggle to hold her family together amid the secrets and emotional fallout of her son’s captivity. Stern’s experience as an actor, producer, teacher, and coach across theater, film, and television lends depth to her performance.
Making her Off-Broadway debut, Awesta Zarif brings urgency and depth to Mina Kharo, an Afghan woman whose cousin was killed during Josh’s kidnapping. Frustrated by the limited diversity in American theater, Zarif moved to Shanghai, where she performed in more than 20 plays and taught drama and music. Her return brings a formidable talent to the New York stage. As Mina, she makes the violence and its casualties immediate, personal, and impossible to dismiss.
Photo Credit: Marc J. Franklin
Over its hour-and-forty-minute running time, Aftermath expands one family’s crisis into a piercing examination of privilege, sacrifice, and moral responsibility. By setting generational conflict against war’s enduring human cost, Zax refuses easy distinctions among victim, survivor, and bystander. The play leaves us with a question that lingers long after the final scene: survival may end the ordeal, but who carries its debt?
