MONTREAL — The descent of the eloquent and idealistic A.M. Klein from an exuberant and engaged youth into a silence and madness at mid-life from which he never emerged is sensitively portrayed in the new play Haunted House.

Playwright Endre Farkas, left, and Sandor Klein converse following the opening night performance of Haunted House, Farkas’ dramatization of the life of A.M. Klein.

Playwright Endre Farkas, like the late Klein a poet first and foremost, has created a suitably literate dramatization of Klein’s life and times, liberally incorporating Klein’s own lyrical words throughout.

Told in chronological fashion, the story offers possible insights into why Klein broke down mentally at the height of his creative power when he was highly respected as a public figure.

The definitive answer, however, remains a mystery, even though Klein’s two sons were consulted in the making of the play.

Haunted House, which is having its world premiere at The Studio of the Segal Centre for Performing Arts until March 5, launches a year of commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Klein’s birth. He died in 1972.

Local actor Eric Hausknost plays Klein’s complex character in an understated and credible manner. The other principal characters are his struggling immigrant parents, vivacious wife Bessie, socialist friend David Lewis (who would become NDP leader) and hard-nosed whiskey merchant Sam Bronfman, for whom he worked as a “shpieler” and later as a speechwriter.

This is a production of the four-year-old Table d’Hôte Theatre, directed by Hausknost’s wife, Liz Valdez, and includes an original score by Lucie Monsarrat.

The set consists of an armchair and a small desk with a typewriter, and Klein alternates between the two. Behind him are a series of tall, frosted glass panels from which emerge the personalities that populate his memory.

A good chunk of the beginning of the 90-minute play is devoted to the life Klein’s religious parents led in a Ukrainian shtetl before they fled persecution for Canada, and to the situation of poor Jewish immigrants to Montreal at that time, suggesting this is a heritage that shaped both his strong Jewish identity and his championing of working people.

His father, Kalman, is a dreamy fellow who makes little money as an underpresser. His mother, Yetta, is the one with the ambition: she wants her only son with the magisterial name Abraham Moses to be “a somebody” and pushes him to go into law, chiding him that poetry – his true avocation – is for losers.

He pleases his mother and goes into law at the Université de Montréal, where he gains fluency in French, his third language after Yiddish and English.

Klein is a brilliant, slightly nerdy student, with a love of words and ideas. He has an off-beat sense of humour and the kids call him “Sir Klein.”

As an adult, he soon grows frustrated with what he must do for a living, whether practising law, ghostwriting for Mr. Sam, or later, teaching English at McGill, instead of devoting himself to his writing.

Nevertheless, the esteem with which he is held in the Jewish community grows through his editorial writing in the Jewish Chronicle and his public speaking, especially on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Klein had a golden pen and tongue.

Against his wife’s pleading, he twice runs unsuccessfully for the CCF, the forerunner of the NDP, in the largely Jewish riding of Cartier. He feels “betrayed by my people” for their lack of support at the polls.

Klein’s personality continues to darken with the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe and Montreal, a city he loves dearly.

He feels an impotent rage at not being able to join the army when the war breaks out, and grows increasingly despondent and obsessive as the Holocaust becomes known.

His elation with the creation of the State of Israel is deflated after a visit to the country. He realizes he does not belong there either.

Despite the respect he enjoys and the love of his family, the dramatized Klein is essentially a solitary man. He laments that he cannot find his way in the world.

By the mid-1950s when he was only in his 40s, Klein stopped writing, withdrew from the public eye, and eventually barely spoke to his own wife and kids. He would die in obscurity. Years later, interest in his huge body of work would revive his memory.

Sandor Klein, a Montreal lawyer and the younger of the two sons, attended opening night of Haunted House and said that he liked it.

Farkas said he had the co-operation of Sandor and his brother, Colman, in the making of the play. He needed the permission of the estate to reproduce Klein’s writings, but the sons were also helpful in developing an accurate portrait of the man.

They read the script and made a few suggestions for changes, but otherwise gave Farkas a free hand.

The play’s future is uncertain. “If anyone has $200,000, we will be happy to stage it again,” said Farkas, who worked on Haunted House, on and off, for more than a decade.