Bearing Witness Behind Wires

This week, I saw Svandovo Theatre's production of the Holocaust drama The Good and the True, which is now playing at DR2 Theatre in New York. One of the oldest drama theatres in Prague, Svandovo usually performs plays in Czech, but with English supertitles in order to bring in a more international audience. This production, however, has been adapted into English by Brian Daniels, so you won't need to worry about reading and watching at the same time.

The Good and the True presents side by side two first-person narratives of Czech Jews who both narrowly escaped being murdered during the Holocaust. The characters, portrayed by Isobel Pravda and Saul Reichlin, never meet during the course of the play, but their stories have similar arcs. Both, while Jewish, are happily integrated into Czech society, and both are surprised when the German army takes over their country in a matter of days with scarcely any resistance. Both are sent to Auschwitz, and both escape death through a combination of happenstance and well timed initiative.

Because the two stories do not seem to intersect, it seems odd at first that these two particular narratives have been selected. However, they both view the Holocaust from a distinctly Czech perspective. For instance, when victims go to the gas chambers singing the Czechoslovakian national anthem, we see the Holocaust not just as a religious or ethnic struggle, but one of free nations struggling to assert themselves amidst the darkness of Nazi tyranny.

The first thing the audience notices when walking into the theatre is that barbed wire is stretched across the proscenium, literally cutting off the audience from the action on the stage. This might seem unduly alienating, separating audience and performers as "us" and "them" the same way Jews and other "undesirables" were separated from the rest of the world under the Third Reich. However, the lighting design (originally created by Karel Simek) makes the wires seem to vanish at times, so our focus is entirely on the actors. At other moments, the performers walk right up to the wires, and the lighting accentuates the barrier locking them into the concentration camp.

Several adaptors shaped the testimonies of actress Hana Pravda and athlete Milos Dobry into the script, and there are a few times when the play feels like there were too many cooks in the kitchen, but the narratives themselves are--as the title implies--both good and true.

Hana Pravda was a noted Czech actor who got taken under the wing by ‪Olga Scheinpflugová‬, then the wife of R.U.R. author Karel Capek. Having her played by her own granddaughter, Isobel Pravda, adds an element of personal significance to the performance, and Ms. Pravda (who also appeared in the latest Jack Ryan movie directed by Kenneth Branagh) executes the role flawlessly.

Mr. Reichlin gives an equally moving performance as Milos Dobry, a young athlete whose physical strength helped save his life when he was chosen to be moved to a labor camp rather than be sent to the gas chambers. Amidst the nightmare of the Holocaust, Dobry also met and fell in love with his future wife while the two were being held at a camp in Terezin. This love story helps not only the character, but the audience, too, to get through the hellish events narrated in the play.

If I had one criticism of the piece, it would be that all of the action on stage--the stunning set, the skilled lighting, the music that gets brought in several times--does not necessarily make the stories any more moving than if they had been recited by two actors standing still on a bare stage. It is the narratives that grab us, and the sets, costumes, lighting, and music all seem somewhat superfluous with stories this powerful.

Thoughts on German Expressionism

There have always been ties between theatrical movements and movements in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Those ties were particularly close in Expressionism, where the first Expressionist drama was actually written by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. His short play Murderer, Hope of Women shows a woman being branded onstage. This is followed by the mass murder of nearly everyone in the cast. The play premiered in 1909 at an outdoor theatre in Vienna, but was interrupted when soldiers from a nearby barracks saw the branding scene from afar and rushed in to stop the performance. Kokoschka narrowly escaped being arrested for disturbing the peace.

Expressionism aimed to depict the subjective emotional experiences of characters rather than an objective reality. It deliberately distorted perspective for emotional effect. Both in painting and in acting style, it was harsh and angular. Actors frequently wore heavy make-up, and in the case of Murderer, Hope of Women, Kokoschka actually painted the bodies of actors to show the muscles beneath their skins. Expressionist writers railed against the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and the creation of massive, impersonal cities. Their work aimed to be universal and yet deeply personal at the same time.

In 1912, Reinhard Sorge won the prestigious Kleist Prize for his Expressionist drama The Beggar. The five-act play follows a young poet with a mentally disturbed father. As the poet tries to find his own voice, various friends and advisors attempt to counsel him, but he remains true to his himself, and the play ends with a hymn to the dramatic vistas of the future. As is typical of Expressionist drama, the characters are given generic designations such as "The Poet," "The Father," "The Girl," and "The Patron of the Arts." After writing The Beggar, Sorge converted to Catholicism following years of atheism and turned to writing religious dramas. Sadly, he died in the First World War at the age of 24 and was buried in a mass grave.

Also in 1912, Georg Kaiser wrote the Expressionist drama From Morn to Midnight, which was not performed until 1917. The play concerns a bank teller who steals money in order to run off with a mysterious and beautiful foreign woman whom he thinks is a criminal. When it turns out the woman is actually a respectable lady and not the con artist he took her for, the man realizes his life has been ruined for nothing. He spends the day wandering the streets and ultimately dies in a night that is both literal and metaphorical. Kaisar later explored themes of science fiction in his plays Gas I and II. Czeck playwright Karel Capek continued this trend in the play R.U.R., which first introduced the word "robot."

Not all Expressionist playwrights were dour. Carl Sternheim used Expressionism to lampoon the aspirations of the middle classes. His farce The Underpants is best known in the United States from an adaptation written by the comedian Steve Martin. In a later play, The Strongbox, a respectable professor actually locks himself in a chest to count securities rather than enjoy his beautiful young wife. Another comedy, Citizen Schippel, shows how a coarse lower-class clarinet player enters the ranks of society by helping a singing quartet win a crown of laurel leaves at a music festival. Sternheim's comedies are exaggerated distortions of daily life that are both hysterically funny and deeply disturbing.

R.U.R.

I saw Resonance Ensemble's production of R.U.R. last night, and I have a few thoughts.

First of all, I am definitely opposed to the extermination of the human race by killer robots. In case anyone was wondering, I am definitely NOT in favor of killer robots wiping out humans. That would be bad.

Then why is a play about it so much fun? Karel Capek's 1920 drama about Rossum's Universal Robots still holds its own, even amidst seemingly endless waves of Cybermen, Daleks, Cylons, and other imitators of Capek's original robots.

Resonance Ensemble's production updates the play, using a new adaptation by playwright and sometime sci-fi writer Lee Eric Shackleford. The most noticeable change is a framing device in which Alquist (played by Chris Ceraso) looks back over the robot war, and reports on his inability, as the last remaining human, to make any progress. (The nature of Alquist's research is explained later, and will not be a surprise to anyone who has read the original.)

The play is being performed at the Beckett Theatre on 42nd Street through Groundhog's Day. For more information, check out www.resonanceensemble.org/