Lou Grant’s in town! That is to say, Ed Asner — the man who won multiple awards playing the crusty Mr. Grant — is in Tampa tonight and Sarasota tomorrow night for staged readings of Jeff Cohen’s play The Soap Myth.

The play takes place more than a half century after the end of WWII when a young journalist sets out to write an article about a cantankerous Holocaust survivor who’s on a crusade to confirm that Nazis made soap from the corpses of murdered Jews — an atrocity dismissed as myth by some scholars, who fear the story, if untrue, could provide fuel to Holocaust deniers. The play tackles such timely and provocative themes as how a survivor survives surviving, who has the right to write history and how do we determine the truth.

The Soap Myth is in its fourth year of “concert reading” tours all over the country. “Holocaust education is more important than ever,” says the playwright, Jeff Cohen. “I feel a renewed urgency to fight the tide of hatred using the weapons I possess — words and ideas.”