​The folk opera A Night in the Old Marketplace had its world premiere at Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theater. Based on Isaac Leib Peretz’s Bei Nakht Oyfn Altn Mark, the play presents poetic images in a dream-like atmosphere where a multitude of different characters appear onstage. 

According to Glen Berger, who wrote the book and lyrics for Marketplace, “Peretz’s original play is filled to brimming with moving, startling poetry, but is lacking in anything that could be called ‘plot’.” Not wanting to lose the poetry of the play, he and composer Frank London and director Alexandra Aron (who conceptualized the project), “married it to music, with many of Peretz’s original lines either directly incorporated into song or inspiring the songs.” 

Berger’s editing of Peretz’s language allowed for one unusual statement after another, for example, “he will drown in a spoonful of water,” turning the old marketplace into a landscape of hell, and stripping the original Yiddish text down to its essence while trying to translate old joys and fears into our own hopeful, though angst-ridden times. 

The creative team—Aron, Berger, and London—tried to stay true to the absurdist view of Jewish life that Peretz had presented, while at the same time incorporating it into a modern medium where Eastern European klezmer music blends with American jazz. 

Peretz presented an almost Gordian Knot for the New York-based theatre artists who recognized that to make this old play come alive again, they had to cut through the many hundreds of figures, apparitions, and even animals that appeared in Peretz’s original Yiddish manuscript. 

The resulting work, part musical, part folk opera, looked and felt like a Vaudevillian mosaic, created out of the “seemingly unproduceable vision in verse,” which brought to the stage what Aron calls “a fevered dreamscape” that showed the “contradictory impulses toward Jewish culture” in a writer “whose heart was devoted to the religious world of the shtetl, despite all of its seemingly backward mores.” To create some kind of coherence, the team foregrounded three protagonists: the Recluse, the passed-over bridegroom Nosn, and the wedding jester Badkhn, who planned rebellion in Russian-dominated Poland—ten years before the October Revolution of 1917—raising his fist against "God or whoever is running this universe." 

The plot centers on the transformation of a wealthy, ugly old man (Guil Fisher) who marries a beautiful young woman (Deborah Grausman) who pines for a handsome young fellow (the lively Steven Rattazzi), but for economic reasons gets forced to put her family over her feelings. After she commits suicide by drowning in a well at the marketplace of the little shtetl, the old husband turns into a recluse, making him act like the half brother of Moses in a mental desert and the blinded King Lear in a Polish shtetl. 

The mad Badkhn (the stunning Ray Wills) adds to the play’s coherence. His extraordinary wide-range presented a kind of visual vox populi, with as many facial expressions as characters in the original Peretz play, and a voice so alluring that he even managed to get the audience to sing along. 

With these eccentric characters, plus a very tall, attractive young woman Gargoyle (the beautifully voiced Charlotte Cohn), made to look like a pre-op transvestite with platform-heeled boots racing, almost flying, across the stage, and playing tricks on the main characters, some theatre-goers may misread this musical as a campy Halloween entertainment. 

However, the Gargoyle acted as one of the prime movers in bringing out the multi-layered character of this play where past, present, and future come together as frighteningly as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but without Dickens’ neat and logical plot. Rather, the viewers are drawn into a wild, medieval, Jewish Totentanz—a modern Danse Macabre—uniting everyone, the living and the dead alike. 

Tine Kindermann and Mor Erlich’s brilliant stop motion animations flashed onto a backdrop above a cemetery (designed by Lauren Helpern), making old woodcuts come alive, and enhancing the eerie nature of a production in which a headless (Melinda Blake) and a tongueless (Mathew Burrow) character added to the surreal, dream-like, nightmarish atmosphere. 

Tyler Micoleau’s lighting ran a red beam across the stage like curdled blood when the dead were being called from the grave, all supported by Nick Kourtides’ electrifying sound design. The costumes by Levi Okunov, the 22-year old Hassidic wunderkind fashion designer from New York City, might have stunned on a catwalk in Paris, but here they varied between illuminating the dream-like quality of the play and giving design historians a reason to cringe. 

Lauren Helpern’s scenic design seemed plain in contrast to the rich subject matter this play explored, although when the gates to the cemetery opened, the stage came alive, as it did beautifully when a white chuppah flowed from above like a blessing with the young couple walking right underneath it. Recent Barrymore winner Karen Getz’s choreography tried to blend traditional Jewish dances with modern elements, but only managed to create embarrassing, awkward movements, particularly when the four Yashiva students—two “Yashiva boys” and two bearded “Yahiva girls” dressed like men with stuck on beards—were prancing across the stage. 

To appreciate this unusual musical, one has to accept melodrama as part of the dream-like convention that was popular in 19th C. drama, with young women dying and spirits bringing them back to the stage. To understand this play, one has to see the wider picture, namely, the attempt to create a whole new vision of life, however fantastic, and I admire the Prince Music Theater for their courage to once again open their season with an ambitious new work. 

In a way, experiencing A Night in the Old Marketplace feels like seeing Dadaism having reached a Polish shtetl. This musical unearthed a wide-range of human experiences, including doubting God, conflicted feelings about “the revolution,” a belief in the supernatural, and a chance for redemption that Job, the torn soul in the most difficult part of the Bible, experienced, except that the Jobs in this play are down-to-earth, small-village folks who rise and fall with their feelings and experiences for the entire uninterrupted 90 minutes of the play. 

The scene with the smashed wedding glass presents perhaps one of the most symbolic parts of the play. Nosn, once a hopeful young bridegroom who got deprived of his bride, now an aging bachelor, permanently carries around a red bag with the wedding shards of his rival—a daily reminder of his defeat and his guilty memory of his part in the premature death of his bride. However, at the end, in the wedding with the dead, the Badkhn transforms those splinters and shards of the past into a new glass and holds it up for all to see: a moment where hope wins over guilt and even death.
​
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A Night in the Old Marketplace
at Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theater 
September 28 - October 21 2007 
Book and Lyrics by Glen Berger 
Music by Frank London 
Conceived by Alexandra Aron 
Inspired by I.L. Peretz

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2007. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Although Philadelphia is separated from Jerusalem by 9313 kilometers (or 5787 miles), in the city of Brotherly Love feelings still run high among Jewish-Americans on Israeli-Palestinian issues. The Interact Theatre, under Artistic Director Seth Rozin, which aims to “change the world, one play at a time," presented free staged readings of four plays (see below) and a panel discussion as part of the Israeli-Palestinian Theatre Festival, all centered around the world premiere of Larry Loebell’s House, Divided. 

While House, Divided received outstanding reviews and large audiences, many in the Philadelphia Jewish Community seem skeptical vis-à-vis Palestinian-Israeli dialogues. However, no event brought in more people than the reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie, delivered with a wide-range of feelings and a powerful sense of humanity by Philadelphia actress Julianna Zinkel. Corrie, who acknowledged the suffering of Jewish people, also wrote, “The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. [. . . .] but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state and Jewish people."

Corrie’s story found resonance during the panel discussion, which featured Rosi Greenberg, a young Jewish woman and daughter of a rabbi who went to Israel with Birthright, stayed with an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem for one month, and then lived with a Palestinian family for two months. As a result of these experiences, she said she felt strengthened in her Jewish heritage; however, like Corrie, she identified with Palestinians and clearly distinguished between Israeli state policies and Jewish people who reach out and search for peaceful solutions. 

The reading and the panel prompted a great deal of discussion among panel members and from the audience. Several older people present told me that they were very skeptical and had heard negative things about the diary of Rachel Corrie. However, they admitted that they were deeply moved and even cried, but most of all, recognized that there needs to be more dialogue. 

Panelist Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer said that Jewish people have been oppressed for over 2000 years and were always the victims, people without any power. However, since 1948, things have changed dramatically, and Israelis now struggle with a human use of power and force. She added that these conflicts have fractured Jewish communities, and that even within Jewish families, the rifts can run very deep, well illustrated by Interact’s production of Loebell’s play. 

Responding to her comments, one person present compared the treatment of Palestinians to that of Native Americans, who were deprived of their land and their rights. Another audience member offered a litmus test for learning and understanding, explaining that putting oneself into the position of the other can create a shift in perspective, where dialogue and more creative solutions can evolve. The Rabbi concluded the panel by encouraging everyone to read Israeli books and newspapers, including Haaretz, and pointed out that while Jewish-Americans often tend to see things in black-and-white terms, many Israelis are significantly more informed and far more flexible. 

Afterwards, a Jewish attendee wrote to say, “Many of us here spend much time trying to make sense of it all. Tough, heartfelt, eye-opening conversations occur between folks who are willing to not just listen, but really hear. Sometimes it's not very easy -- especially letting go of long held beliefs that can trigger anger, fear, disappointment . . . [But] Much good work around this is being done by the Jewish Dialogue Group and those that support them." Clearly, the Interact’s Israeli/Palestinian festival had not only stirred up feelings, but initiated future dialogues by using these plays and issues to generate a process of thought and reflection. 

Below, the full schedule of Interact Theatre Company’s Israeli/Palestinian Play Festival: 

Saturday, June 7, 2008 
11:00 a.m. Concert Reading : Dirty Story
written by John Patrick Shanley, directed by Sean Christopher Lewis 
From the acclaimed author of Doubt and Moonstruck comes this metaphorical and satirical take on the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian people, as an itinerant young writer moves in with her surly middle-aged mentor only to embark on a truly dysfunctional relationship, abetted by an equally dysfunctional British and American duo. 

2:00 p.m Concert Reading : My Name is Rachel Corrie,
Adapted from Rachel Corrie’s personal diary by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, directed by John Bellomo, featuring Julianna Zinkel 
The controversial one-woman play chronicles a young American woman’s observations and insights as she travels to the West Bank to fight for the Palestinian cause and, ultimately, dies at the hands of an Israeli bulldozer while standing in front of a Palestinian home. 

4:00 p.m.: Symposium 
A panel discussion examining different perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
Featuring Rosie Greenberg, Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer & Marlena Santoyo of the Jewish Voice for Peace 

8:00 p.m.: Mainstage Performance House, Divided, written by Larry Loebell, directed by Seth Rozin 

Sunday, June 8, 2008 
11:00 a.m.: Concert Reading : Reading Hebron,
written by Jason Sherman, directed by Seth Reichgott 
A Canadian Jew, while struggling with his own religious and cultural identity, becomes obsessed with the Palestinian cause in the wake of the massacre at the mosque in Hebron. 

2:00 p.m.: Mainstage Performance House, Divided, written by Larry Loebell, directed by Seth Rozin 

7:00 p.m.: Concert Reading : Goliath,
written by Karen Hartmann, directed by Lisa Jo Epstein 
A family of settlers are forced to evacuate their house by a conflicted Israeli army officer, revealing divisions within the Jewish community. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​My grandfather, a military officer during WWI brought up his sons to believe in militarism as a kind of religion where Germany had to be defended against evil on a permanent basis. One of his sons, my father, although critical of his father’s life, became a propaganda officer and foreign correspondent in Occupied France during WWII, where he vehemently supported the Third Reich. My father had nothing but negative things to say about Jewish people whom he clearly did not know, let alone understand. 

Two years ago, I found his correspondence with my mother and wrote Metronome Ticking, a docudrama about the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Sitting inside Philadelphia’s intimate Interact Theatre and witnessing the clashes of Jewish parents and their children in Israel and the United States, I was powerfully reminded of the struggles of ideologies among siblings, among fathers and sons in this world premiere of Larry Loebell’s House, Divided, a play about two brothers and their sons who are divided by faith, yet held loosely together by blood. 

I realized very quickly that this play goes way beyond a struggle among people of one ethnic or religious minority; rather, a House, Divided is the youngest successor to the old struggle of Titans that we know from Greek mythology, where the Titanic Elders—a race of powerful deities—ruled during the legendary Golden Age before being overthrown by a race of younger gods, the Olympians, a Greek borrowing from the Ancient Near East, which included (modern) Israel and Palestine. 

Loebell’s deeply challenging play shows two primeval characters: Doug Goldstein (Paul Meshejian), a liberal director of Amnesty International, who sees himself as a citizen of the world, trying to bring together warring factions in Israel and Palestine, and his brother Lou Goldstein (David Howey), who left the United States at a young age to live in Israel, where he became a militant Zionist, joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and after retirement, works as a tour guide, arguing his version of history to American tourists. Both these Titan brothers see their Jewish identity in dramatically different ways: 

Doug married a Catholic woman, and despite Lou telling him “that this isn’t a Jewish house,” desperately tried to keep the relationship with his brother and father together, feeling terrible that neither of them had anything to do with him and would not even attend his wedding to a non-Jew. His brother Lou remained as inflexible as the old Greek Titans and brought up his son Oren (Davy Raphaely) to become an ardent defender of Israel as a young soldier in the IDF. Back in the US, Doug’s son Paul (Dan Hodge)—who is neither Jewish by birth nor by upbringing—leads the life of a modern American twenty-something with very few traditions and with computer science becoming his religion, at least at first glance. 

Like the best of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, Loebell composed his latest play with rich detail and an almost mathematical construction, reminiscent of Leibniz’s insight that music, like a good play, “is a secret exercise in arithmetic of the soul.” Loebell probes deep into those two souls by showing their younger selves, who appear physically onstage in a filmic device that flashbacks over 30 years ago to show the young Doug (Noah Herman) and young Lou (Robert Daponte) clashing as they slowly begin to discover those ideologies that will shape their values and fuel their actions and reactions for the rest of their lives. 

Following the fate of the Greek Elders, those Titans who appeared all powerful but who were challenged and eventually replaced by the younger Olympians, Doug and Lou each seem invulnerable only to discover eventually that their two sons are challenging their fathers in unexpected ways. Doug’s son Paul—the ultra-modern American with no values other than a belief in technology—not only irks his father’s pacifist tradition by designing violent video war games, but in spite of his father’s refusal to raise him in the Jewish tradition, later longs for some Jewish identity that will ground him, stunning the audience with an unexpected shift in his allegiance. 

Similarly, the militant Zionist with Orthodox Jewish values and a firm belief in Jewish traditions—that goes so deep that he would not even attend the funeral of his sister-in-law—suddenly discovers that his son Oren, like the Olympians of old, challenges those power positions by beginning to sympathize with the Palestinians after he has been ordered to participate in collective punishments, the destruction of houses, and arrests on no evidence. His conclusion: the IDF only creates bitterness and anger for Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis alike. 

When Lou’s son Oren realizes that “it is impossible for anyone in our esteemed military to see resistance as anything except a mental deficiency,” he tries to desert the IDF by fleeing to the US. In response, his inflexible father hurls this almost Biblical threat at his confused son: “If you do not come back now, you will never again be allowed into Israel. You will never be able to come home.” 

In one of several challenges to his father, young Oren asks, “Didn’t you teach me there’s a civic duty to resist evil? What we blame the average German for. Not resisting the evil of Hitler?” Outraged over such a comparison, the father slaps his adult son hard: “How dare you suggest . . . We have no concentration camps. We’re not exterminating.” 

But while it outrages Lou when his son makes a Nazi comparison, thirty years earlier, Young Lou clearly wanted to use Hitler for his own purposes when he said to his brother Doug about his Catholic fiancée: “If you marry this woman and you have children with her, your children will not be Jewish. You annihilate thirty five hundred years of history in one generation. You annihilate yourself just as surely as if you had let the Nazis do it. If you marry her, you finish Hitler’s work.” 

Loebell takes his audience on a rollercoaster journey into Hades. Several times during the play, members of the audience gasped and made comments, especially during the scene in which Oren describes how he was “ordered to remove a woman from her house . . . So I had to drag her–with her baby, into the street.” 

At that moment, an elderly lady in the second row shouted, “oh, bullshit.” The play clearly was getting under the skin of a number of people in the audience, demonstrating, literally, a house divided, hopefully leading to many fruitful discussions about our actions as human beings, often based on deeply seated, hidden values. Loebell’s play relentlessly shines a light on almost every corner of this divided house, for example, when he has the young Israeli soldier confess to a brutal treatment of Palestinians: “I was holding his wife prisoner while our soldiers, my friends, shot her husband. I was expected to shoot her if she ran. He hadn’t done anything but run away in fear. We were doing business as usual.” 

Just as Bach used a highly calculated approach to musical composition, Loebell presents an almost mathematical balance of different views and ideologies in his play, but with a conversational, intuitive writing style. He fills his script with an extraordinary mixture of poison and counter-poison, of understanding and misunderstanding, of love and hate, of foolishness and wisdom, and often shows these aspects through facts and insights that are based on talking with countless people, many years of studying modern history, and visiting Israel (commissioned through a grant from the  Foundation for Jewish Culture). 

For example, Loebell has the Zionist brother present a view that hits the audience hard with this statement: “All those years Arafat promised compromise in English he was saying death to Israel to his followers in Arabic. And they [Westerners] loved him because he lied to the West and proved you [Americans] foolish.” Later, Doug, the liberal American pacifist who gave up on following Jewish traditions, let alone religious practices, gets equally challenged by his brother and near the end of the play, by his own son in ways that stunned this reviewer and most likely, the audience. 

Although House, Divided spans three decades across two nations separated by thousands of miles, on the small stage at the Interact Theatre, Seth Rozin’s staging created a battlefield on which the two Titans could clash, almost non-stop and from the very beginning. The production was supported by Dirk Durossett’s scenic design, costumes by Susan Smythe, and the dramaturgy of Rebecca Wright who, according to Loebell, had strongly impacted the play’s development by asking a number of helpful, challenging questions from the very beginning. Additionally, Loebell told me that the actors all contributed to the final version of his play. 

In spite of the clashing ideologies and the age differences, the actors formed a balanced ensemble with well-developed characters, strong giants with clay feet, giving the actors a chance to show fine nuances.
Howey showed a very aggressive Lou, who relentlessly hammered away at everyone who did not share his views, especially the more balanced Meshejian, who got rattled by his brother and allowed himself to get drawn into the verbal fights. I was particularly impressed by Hodge’s natural portrayal of the young American Olympian who seemed a computer nerd at first but who transformed into a very committed man, a role played without any signs of effort. Similarly, the Israeli-born Raphaely’s performance as Oren showed a subtlety of feelings and thoughts that suited this role perfectly, almost developing his character into an Israeli Hamlet, a young man unsure of which choice to make. 

I left the theatre still hearing the many voices in Arabic, Hebrew, English, German and other languages that at the conclusion of the show created a cacophony of radio and television comments, each drowning out the other one. Out of the depth of these voices, I heard my father, the man who hated Jews until he witnessed a mass execution in Russia in 1944 and then wrote: “Read more than my letters, read that which I did not write, read that which could shatter my heart.” 

Just as I, as a non-Jewish person, am struggling with my own identity, dethroning those old German Titans of the Third Reich, I strongly identify with Loebell’s play, which most likely will shatter many perceptions that people might have of Jewish people. I am convinced that this play will be performed and studied not only in Israel and in the US, but in many other countries. Even though I am aware that we live in a fractured world, through Loebell’s play, the house divided can perhaps become a house united, or at least become a place where peaceful inquiry on all sides is made possible. 
---------------------------------------
The World Premiere of HOUSE, DIVIDED 
Written by Larry Loebell 
Directed by Seth Rozin 
May 23 - June 22, 2008 
intimate Interact Theatre 2030 Sansom Street • Philadelphia, PA 19103 • Phone: 215-568-8077
Web: http://www.interacttheatre.org/2007-2008-feature-4.html 
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​This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Adolf Hitler liked the grand, 1,750-seat Admiralspalast Theater in Berlin so much that he had a huge royal box built for him and his Nazi entourage to see a fare of his favorites: light operettas like The Merry Widow which he saw during World War II. Little did he know that three generations later, he would be ridiculed at the same theatre with the gay mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, sitting in that famous, although now reduced, royal box during opening night of The Producers by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan. During the Third Reich, Hitler’s henchmen would have dragged the mayor, Mel Brooks, and all Jews and gays in the audience out of the theatre and deported them to a concentration camp. 

Before the Nazis made the Admiralspalast one of their favorite theaters, it was, as Britain’s Daily Mail pointed out, “a 1920s 'pleasure palace', complete with a variety theatre, spa, casino and brothel. Its basement bar was said to be the inspiration for the Kit Kat Club in the musical Cabaret. Goebbels kept a close eye on the repertoire. The management still has his signed edict banning the works of singer Richard Tauber because of his Jewish ancestry.” 

The Führer Returns to Berlin 

It’s against this background of a unique, history-heavy location that the very first performance of The Producers in Germany brought in critics from around the world to witness not only the production itself but to observe audience responses and to interview people in Berlin. Many of the critics, German and non-German alike, reflected on any possible connection between a Jewish-American playwright—who makes fun of Jewish business people, Hitler, gays, blond bombshells, even old ladies—and the German psyche today. 

Not so in the United States. Reviewing The Producers at the famous Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, which was playing at the same time as the one in Berlin, most American critics might as well have written about a production of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City or Madame Butterfly in Nagasaki. With a few exceptions, I did not find many reviewers who probed nooks and crannies of the American psyche—“Can we really laugh at Jews and all the other groups?” the way critics and audience members in Germany asked. Rather, it seemed self-understood that, yes, in America one can make fun of almost anyone. What’s the fuss? 

Historical Countdown: Berlin and Philadelphia 

Ultimately, critics on both sides of the Atlantic constructed their own versions of The Producers, with some critics happily deconstructing the musical. Clearly, writers are schlepping around as many histories and ideologies as anyone else, as witnessed by the many reviews that were written about productions at the Walnut Street Theatre, the oldest, continually operating theater in the English-speaking world, now 200 years old. Today, with over 56,000 subscribers annually, the Walnut is the most subscribed theater company in the world. It has seen on its stage some of the greatest entertainers and actors since 1809. 

For example, when Hitler arrived on the world stage in 1933, the Walnut produced The Curtain Rises, a play which takes place in Vienna, a city which, five years later, raised the Hitler salute in such a way that it extended the hunt for Jewish and gay people all over Austria. The Walnut, by contrast, presented Yiddish theatre in the mid 1930’s under the guidance of Maurice Schwartz who was often called the “Yiddish Barrymore.” “When we finally stamp out the plague,” Hitler confided in Martin Borman via a memorandum in 1941, “we shall have accomplished for mankind a deed whose significance our men out there on the battlefield cannot even imagine yet." In December of 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. 

Unperturbed, the Walnut Street Theatre produced Native Son by Orson Wells in 1942. The same year, the Walnut cast famous stars like Katherine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and Gloria Swanson. And in 1944, at the height of the extermination of Jews, gays, gypsies, Communists, and countless other groups, the Walnut Street Theatre produced the stage adaptation of Embezzled Heaven by Franz Werfel, the internationally acclaimed Jewish expressionist writer and contemporary of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Martin Buber, and other Jewish intellectuals. Werfel who had married Gustav Mahler’s widow, managed to escape first Anschluss-Austria and then occupied France to settle in the United States. 

No Poetry, No Humor after Auschwitz 

In 1945, Hitler committed suicide; his Reich of a thousand years collapsed after only twelve years, leaving millions of people dead. The name Hitler and anything to do with the Nazi regime became a subject so horrendous that hardly anyone in Germany dared to talk about it. This sense of guilt may have been what led Theodor Adorno, four years after the end of World War II, to quit composing and declare: “Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”).

And yet, only a few weeks ago, the Berliner Zeitung asked, “Can there still be humor after Hitler?” The answer may have shocked Adorno: Yes, “Comedians like Mel Brooks have proved it.” 

Alices in Wonderland & The Wizard of Oz: East Coast Critics 

Most of the critics who reviewed the Walnut Street Theatre production of The Producers shared that perspective and took the readers on an enjoyable, if at times bumpy journey. Joel Markowitz, of the DC Theatre Scene, wrote that the director and choreographer of the Philadelphia production, Mark Robin, had helped the actors “find the heart of the musical in, of all places, The Wizard of Oz.” 

Dan Rottenberg, editor of the Broad Street Review, compared the Philadelphia production with a classical Victorian fantasy world inhabited by larger-than-life creatures: “In the Walnut’s production the roles of Max and Leo are capably handled by Ben Lipitz and Ben Dibble, but they come across less as zany characters in their own right than as Alices in Wonderland confronting a succession of far more memorable goofballs: Jeffrey Coon as the crazy Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind, Amy Bodnar as the Swedish bombshell Ulla, Jeremy Webb as the prancing director, Roger DeBris, and above all Robert McClure, who as Roger’s assistant/lover Carmen Ghia steals every scene with his over-the-top mincing theatrics.” 

Similarly, Toby Zinman of the Philadelphia Inquirer presents “a jolly revival at the Walnut Street Theatre” where “The minor characters steal the show, especially the sublimely funny Robert McClure as Carmen Ghia, the moue-making, fluttery assistant to gay director Roger DeBris (Jeremy Webb). Jeffrey Coon as the Nazi playwright, keeper of the Nazi pigeons, with his mighty voice and huge stage presence, is a treat.” 

Enthusiasm for The Walnut Street Theatre Production 

Patti Buehler of the Broadway World saw the Walnut Street Theatre production as “definitely one of their best recent stage offerings as the opening night roars attested to . . . Colleen Grady's costume designs and Robert Andrew Kovach's sets are impressive and well suit this madcap musical. The cast, a mix of New York and Philly regulars is wonderful overall.” 

Not surprisingly, Lewis Whittington, reviewing the Philadelphia production of The Producers for the Edge, a Boston-based hip and gay-friendly publication, observed how “Brooks dishes out the burlesque and schmaltz, plus a high degree of glittering camp, making the show a bubbling over gay soufflé.” Dibble, who played one of the producers, laughed when he shared that Marc Robin, the director-choreographer, “wanted to make this a pretty bawdy production. We were shocked some of what we were rehearsing stayed in.” Critic Rottenberg wryly added: “While recalling the good old days when his chorus girls had ‘the biggest tits,’ Leo’s gesticulating hands inadvertently administer a feel to a passing nun.” 

Claudia Perry of Aisle Say joined the chorus of those reviewers who gave a standing ovation to the Walnut Street production. She described Jeremy Webb as “simply super as Roger de Bris, the very fey director. Standing with impunity in a dress that makes him look like the Chrysler Building.” Lesley Valdes, of Public Broadcasting, summarized the show: “The old gags still work and there are fresh ones in a new production that makes the downright bawdy look smart. So many showpieces are show stoppers.” 

Not every writer, however, was pleased with the Walnut Street production. For example, a number of critics like Patty Buehler of Broadway World objected to the “lack of chemistry between the two ‘Bens’ who play the key roles.” She describes “Ben Lipitz, who does an admirable job, [but who] seems to labor a bit getting into this tough role, while Ben Dibble simply soars as the innocent, slightly neurotic partner. Vocally, Dibble nails his songs while Lipitz seems to struggle with some of his scenes and runs out of steam on the difficult song ‘Betrayed’. The role of Ulla played by Amy Bodnar, a lovely vocal angel, leaves you wanting more over the top comedy and naughtiness. Jeremy Webb's Roger DeBris is eccentrically wonderful, while his Hitler is not all that funny and lacks direction.” 

Standard theatre reviews 

A widely read theatre critic of the Philadelphia Weekly glosses over the deeper issues which The Producers raises. Like a number of other reviewers in Philadelphia, he has little to say that goes beyond general observations: “Along the way Brooks manages to insult everyone: gays, Jews, blacks, women—no group is spared. Because he offends all groups equally, the humor never seems mean-spirited.” 

Overall, it appears that many Philadelphia critics limited themselves to a description of the action, direction, dancing, acting, singing, stage design, etc., and spent precious little time discussing deeper issues that the critics in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Berlin raised when The Producers came to town. These erasures in many reviews of the Walnut Street Theatre production, seen from a German perspective, may at first glance appear puzzling, until one realizes that Americans are carrying around their necks different millstones of history than Germans. To be fair, many critics have only a few hours to write their review for publication the next day, a process that doesn’t always allow for an in-depth analysis. 

“Today’s Germans Are Actually More Pacifist and Rational than We Americans Are” 

Mercifully, some writers like Dan Rottenberg of the Broad Street Review presented critiques that probed and sparkled as much as The Producers: “In effect, what the Marx brothers did to Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera, Mel Brooks in The Producers does to an even more deserving target: Nazi Germany. The difference is that the Marx brothers’ primary schtick involved popping the pretensions of the rich and powerful. Hitler and the Nazis, by contrast, were dead and gone when Brooks made his hilariously audacious 1968 film (also called The Producers)— and by now they’ve been gone so long that today’s Germans are actually more pacifist and rational than we Americans are.” 

Wow, that’s a rare and very special tribute, especially coming from the author of Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy. 

Cool Reception for The Producers in Vienna 

German producers were reluctant to take the risk of staging this much-talked-about musical in Germany, a country where to this day it’s forbidden to display swastikas or to import Hitler’s Mein Kampf from eBay or Amazon. However, Vienna went ahead with a production that, after the initial enthusiasm, didn’t do too well. According to Cornelia Rudat of The Economist, Cornelius Obonya, co-starring as Max Bialystock in both the Vienna and the Berlin production, made a devastating comment about Austrian audiences when he “explained the absence of enthusiasm in Vienna as a result of the country's many ‘honest and serious admirers’ of Adolf Hitler, who may have been offended by the way he is mocked on stage.” 

Writing for Der Spiegel, Germany’s most influential magazine, David Crossland presents a more realistic view: paraphrasing Falk Walter, the driving force behind the Berlin production, who believed that “the Austrian production had been marketed too narrowly, focusing only on traditional musical aficionados, and that he was targeting a broader range of people who wouldn't usually go to see a stage musical.” In short, the cool reception in Vienna could perhaps be explained by a combination of deeply seated ideologies and ineffective marketing. 

Non-German critics at the Admiralspalast 

Walter, the man behind the German production, gets quoted by Crossland about the role of Berlin which to Walter was “the root of all the evil,” even though today the town “also happens to be the most tolerant and exciting city in Germany.” The Berlin impresario then gets quoted as saying, "This isn't about laughing at Hitler but basically about conveying in a humorous way what he was. It addresses the darkest chapter of German history. How could it happen that the country threw morals and ethics overboard and followed this megalomaniac charlatan? The Producers fits wonderfully into the city because at the moment musical theater is categorized as being either opera for culture vultures or mainstream musicals for morons," according to Walter. "This show proves musical theater can be more than that."
But despite Walter’s optimism, before The Producers came to Berlin, many people were concerned about how the audiences would react, as witnessed by David Crossland‘s article in Der Spiegel,written a few weeks before opening night: “Some say Germany isn't ready for tap-dancing stormtroopers and a camp Hitler singing ‘Heil Myself.’” 

“Audiences in London, Tokyo, Athens and even Tel Aviv have all fallen for the crazy comedy. But a German-language version was lacking,” until Titus Hoffmann, highly innovative resident director at the Admiralspalast, brought the play to Germany, according to Susan Stone of Deutsche Welle, the international public radio program. Nigel West, the production’s director in Berlin, explained the different perceptions of German and American audiences: “When you see the show in America, you don't think twice about it. [However,] Because of where we are, you do think twice about it’.” 

To gauge the mood in the German capital, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times quoted the Berlin press: “’Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?’ The Berliner Morgenpost worried needlessly a few days earlier. ‘People in Tel Aviv laughed,’ answered the Berliner Zeitung, as if the spectacle of knee-slapping Israelis might give Germans a little comedic wiggle room. German intellectuals naturally weighed in, too, about the healing effects of laughter.“

However, as witnessed by a number of writers, some audience members felt uneasy–and even pained—during certain moments of the musical. For example, the NY Times correspondent noted that “when SS guards, arms raised in the Hitler salute, shouting Nazi slogans, marched onstage during the second act’s big Busby Berkeley-like ‘Springtime for Hitler’ number, it seemed to me that the temperature in the theater did drop ever so slightly.” 

Of all the critics from around the world who came to Berlin, Robert Hardman of Britain’s Mail wrote one of the most perceptive and entertaining reviews, ranging from his mock-German heading (“Ve have vays of making you laugh!”)—a regular staple among many British writers—to his verdict that The Producers in Berlin represents “a cultural milestone for modern Germany. The Nazis are now, officially, joke material.” 

Given that Anglo-German relationships have been strained for a long time, it does not come as a surprise to have this British critic probe the German soul: “This has been a risky business, [. . .] a bold move to bring it to Germany—and an even bolder one to wrap the entire theatre in red Nazi-style drapes and banners just like a Nuremberg rally. The whole exercise has been a test of the German psyche.” Hardman concludes that after the opening night there was “a palpable sense of relief.” 

The Producers vs. Hollywood Productions of One-Dimensional Resistance Heroes 

Writing for one of Germany’s prestigious weekly magazines, Der Spiegel, Christine Wahl observed that “At the public preview on Friday evening, the audience put the pretzel flags, which were distributed at the entrance as a risqué prop, to good use, as if they were at a child's birthday party. There was hardly a song that didn't receive—somewhat excessive—applause accompanied by plenty of flag waving.” Not quite sure about what she has just witnessed, she asks, “It remains to be seen what kind of reaction the show will get here.” 

The Spiegel critic concludes: “This version of The Producers, staged by Nigel West, clearly fits perfectly into the current wave of mainstream Third Reich-themed entertainment as the light-hearted counterpart to Hollywood productions such as Valkyrie or Defiance, with their one-dimensional resistance heroes and tired clichés.” 

“Enthusiastic Leni Riefenstahl” 

The growing, often brutal awareness that played an important part in the development of Germany since 1945 is now surfacing in many a review of The Producers and its first stage production in Berlin. Presenting old German sensitivities, former East German journalist, Cornelia Rudat, now writing for the Economist in London, admits: “There was one scene I had trouble with. It was when storm troopers in Nazi uniforms with swastika armbands goose-step on stage singing ‘Springtime for Hitler and winter for France and Poland!’ I just could not bring myself to clap. Reassuringly, I was not the only one. To me this scene was no longer making fun of Hitler but fun of the war (this music number features paper-mâché tanks and some noisy bullet shots). I worried about how Polish or French guests in the audience might feel.” 

Rudat then second-guesses some of the production’s political choices: “It was a clever move on the part of the show's producers to replace the swastika on the red banners outside the theatre with images of pretzels and sausages. Why not for the armbands on stage?” Not surprisingly, Rudat, reporting about “the opening night’s standing ovation” then wonders: “It remains to be seen whether Berlin's audience will continue to be so liberal.” 

Perhaps one of the most vivid reviews comes from Frederik Hanssen of Berlin’s liberal Tagesspiegel: “For one moment the audience stopped breathing when the swastika flags were unveiled; when the chorus paraded in, goose-stepping, and when Adolf Hitler arrives at the top of the stairs . . . a fantastic spectacle took place then, just as in those days in Nuremberg. One could almost hear Leni Riefenstahl whose bony fingers, full of enthusiasm, are knocking against the lid of her coffin.” 

Standing Ovation for the Berlin Cast of The Producers 

Giving credit to “Phillip Bloom [who] managed to salvage a maximum of wit in his German translation,” Hanssen considers the cast “the greatest triumph of the German version: Cornelius Obonya lends his Max Bialystock the precarious height of a Mack the Knife. The entrancingly awkward Andreas Bieber as Leo Bloom, a milquetoast who hangs on for dear life to his sniffle-cloth, who would love to be an asshole like the producer, but cannot shed his honest skin. Bettina Mönch as the Swedish sex-bomb Ulla is the perfectly played blonde joke. Herbert Steinböck’s Bavarian blubbering as the old Nazi Franz Liebkind contrasts in a heart-warming way with the quintet of queens around Martin Sommerlatte’s Roger Debris. The ensemble sings and dances with grandiosity, the musicians have the right swing for Mel Brooks’ wonderful, old-fashioned, infectious melodies, which Doug Besterman and Larry Blank arranged congenially in the style of the 40’s.” 

Vox Britanniae and The Producers 

The anonymous, unedited responses to the review in Britain’s Mail seem to suggest that even in the UK views of Germany seems to improve: 

“well Done Mel Brookes - he can't have imagined, when he wrote this, that it would ever appear in Berlin!” 
“If the Germans can laugh at Hitler & making the Swaztika a Symbol of fun instead of something to fear then maybe those who still use it as a Nazi symbol will be laughed at too.” 

“Now the Third Reich and Hitler can be considered as 'funny' enough to mock and parody, the Germans and Austrians can finally start to move on from the crushing guilt most of them feel. And we should, too. This shows that the healing is complete.”

Vox Germaniae and The Producers 

Going by most of the articles that appeared in print and on the Internet, it seems the vast majority of theatre-goers in Berlin thoroughly enjoyed themselves as Judith Bonesky and Michael Schacht of Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, documented: “Can One, Should One, May One Laugh About Hitler?” the paper asked and reported: “1400 Guests were united in their response: YES!” A cross-section of the theatre-goers was then interviewed. Their responses seemed truly supportive of a musical that touched many a nerve. 

Actress Judy Winter, 65: “Of course, what else, in the name of God?! I am more afraid of the new Nazis who are running around and taking all of that seriously.” 

Fashion designer Wolfgang Joop, 64: “The best way of coming to terms with the past is through humor. Hitler was a little nobody. To make fun of him is easy, because—seen from our perspective today—he comes over as a comic figure.” 

Best-selling author Eckhart von Hirschhausen, 41: “I believe that humor plays an important role in strengthening a democracy. A totalitarian state is always devoid of humor.” 

Similarly, anonymous readers of Berlin’s Tagespiegel wrote the following: 

“Even though Hitler is not the main figure of the film and the musical (2001), he is, however, perceived as the ‘star’ that he is, especially in Germany, and everyone is talking about the black pretzels and the red flags and the ‘gay Hitler’.” 

“Altogether there seems to be a new Hitler wave . . . it hitlers everywhere. Even in the late-night programs on T.V. I have never before seen so much Hitler as during the last two years. Is that a sign of the new ease in handling history?” 

And Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent to the BBC, cites several people whose views seem representative of the zeitgeist, including 34-year-old Sven Schmidt: “It's another generation. We don't have that much to do with it anymore . . . it's OK to laugh. It's not OK to make fun of the Holocaust. But Hitler as a person is OK to ridicule.” 

Location, Location, Location and Its Impact on Theatre-goers and Critics 

Comparing the reviews of The Producers in Philadelphia and Berlin it becomes apparent that the physical and mental location of a play can lead to dramatically different perceptions and interpretations. The emotional impact of The Producers, a parody, on some members of a German audience could not be guaranteed beforehand just as it’s difficult to gauge the impact of a performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play based on diaries and email, on Jewish audiences. For either audience-member, Jew or non-Jew, the presentation of such controversial material may give some people fits—as in the following example of a letter to the editor at the Mail, complaining about the Berlin production of The Producers: “This is just about the crassest and dumbest attempt at humour I have ever heard of [. . .] This ridiculous vomit-inducing production has just no place at all in modern German society.” 

While the American responses to The Producers in Philadelphia were very positive, the same could not be said for all reviews of films like Fahrenheit 911 or Sick by Michael Moore as they seemed to hit close to home, unlike overseas responses to Fahrenheit 911 which led to waves of uncharacteristic applause by European audiences at the end of many showings of the film. Similarly, the reviews in the 1960’s of some of the plays by Leroi Jones (who changed his name to Amiri Baraka), confronting white Americans, such as The Toilet or The Dutchman, showed a searching of the American psyche and led to extraordinary discussions by critics and audience members alike: responses ran the gamut from an earnest mea culpa to total rejection and ridicule.

Jewish Wit Returns to Germany

Time can impact the perception of earlier, painful periods in one’s own history. For example, while no one laughed at the Baraka plays in the 60’s, today’s black stand-up comedians on US basic cable programs attack certain racial and sexual relations—often taking the audience along on a rollercoaster of laughter and disgust. 

Something similar has happened in Germany: time and its distancing effect have ameliorated the fear of a recurrence of a Nazi regime and its brutalities. As a result, modern plays and musicals which deal with the past also are perceived differently than they might have been decades ago. For example, actor Andreas Bieber, who played Bloom in both the Vienna and Berlin productions, concluded: "It's really not about denying history and what happened, but we have to move on, and we have to look at things from a different angle, and it's great to do that in the city where it all happened" –indeed, in the Berlin of the 1920’s, notes Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, “a slew of Jewish performers, Mr. Brooks’s comedic relatives and inspiration, did their shtick onstage,” before the brownshirts took over. 

No wonder that the Berlin production of The Producers made the New York Times conclude: “amid the laughter of the German crowd, you can almost hear a page of history turn.” Similarly, Frederik Hanssen of Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, looking back at history, concludes with a realistic, sad, and yet hopeful view: 
​
“When did Berlin see such witty, such brilliantly naughty comedy? Before 1933 there were these elegant, cynical script authors, composers, and gag-writers à la Mel Brooks who were in love with life, even here in the capital of the German Reich. The Nazis with their racial stupidity have persecuted, ostracized, and destroyed them-–or expelled them into exile to America. From there, we Germans, 64 years after the end of the Nazi period, can now, at best, re-import Jewish wit. With The Producers the feisty, free spirit of the often cited Golden Twenties has arrived in Berlin again.” 

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Admiralspalast Theater in Berlin web: http://www.admiralspalast.de/
Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia web: http://www.walnutstreettheatre.org/
Mel Brooks web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks
The Producers (musical) web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(musical)
The Producers (2005 film)  web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(2005_film)
Springtime for Hitler - The Producers(1968)  on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K08akOt2kuo
The Producers (2005) on You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNXj-SCx5dY&NR=1
The Audition - The Producers (1968)  on You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ni_RtKMpak&feature=related   
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This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

No subject gets discussed more often and more vehemently around the world than the sharp decline of the American economy and the upcoming election between a Democratic African-American presidential candidate and his white Republican opponent. I do not know many plays that made me think of these hard and challenging times as much as Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry—a writer who intimately knows not only the Jewish world, but the tension and underlying racial currents in the United States—the only American playwright who won three of the most prestigious American awards for dramatic writing: the Academy Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the Tony Award. 

The Hedgerow Theatre in Media could not have chosen a better play to bring together Jewish people, African-Americans, and whites to laugh, to cry, and to talk about perceptions we may have of each other. 

Temple University’s Peter Reynolds directed Driving Miss Daisy at the beautiful Hedgerow Theatre with great sensitivity, so much so that the audience at the opening night gave a standing ovation to the superb cast of the amazing Nancy Boykin as Miss Daisy Werthan, the nuanced and powerful Harum Ulmer, Jr., who played her black driver Hoke Coleburn, and the strong and handsome Andy Joos, who played Daisy’s son Boolie Werthan, a businessman in the South, and Cathie Miglionico’s, who designed the costumes, Zoran Kovcic, who created a beautiful and very functional stage setting, illuminated by the perfect lighting design of Maria Shaplin, all of which enhanced this very intimate play. 

Uhry’s drama shows an African-American chauffeur who gets belittled left, right, and center by Miss Daisy, an elderly Jewish lady in Atlanta, GA, who has trouble letting go of the memories of her poor background during her youth. Initially, she carries a great deal of prejudice against people of color, unlike her son who, from the very beginning, presents himself as an open-minded businessman. While Boolie tries to help his mother move forward, she resists it every step of the way, first making fun of Boolie’s wife Florine for enjoying the company of non-Jews, and later teasing her son’s wife for finding “heaven on earth” by “socializing with Episcopalians.” 

Miss Daisy mocks “that silly Santa Claus winking on the front door!” of a Jewish house and belittles the looks of her daughter-in-law by saying, “If I had a nose like Florine, I wouldn’t go around saying Merry Christmas to anybody.” When Hoke objects and tells her that he enjoys Christmas at her son’s house, Miss Daisy shoots back, “I don’t wonder. You’re the only Christian in the place.” The audience at the Hedgerow laughed almost non-stop during a play that shows human foibles but also the fear that sits below the humor, a kind of trembling humanity that one doesn’t see too often. 

Several times, Miss Daisy refers to her poor economic background, where the family could not even afford to feed a stray cat. Her driver then reminds her, “You is rich, Miz Daisy!”—a notion that she resists as her mindset is still anchored in the past, not in the present. “Yassum,” Hoke replies, but it “look like you doin’ alright now.” In fact, the working class chauffeur becomes a kind of reality check for her, even though she did not acknowledge it until the surprise ending of the play. 

Uhry shows the most subtle psychological shades of people from different social classes and ethnic groups who realize that deep down, they all have been discriminated against. The chauffeur, a streetwise man in spite of his attempt to be polite, has the courage to say things that one would not ask in polite society: “Mist’ Werthan? Y’all people Jewish, ain’ you...I’d druther drive for Jews. People always talkin’ bout they stingy and they cheap, but don’t say none of that ‘roun me.” In fact, Mr. Werthan is very generous from the very beginning, and tries to help his mother by paying for the chauffeur, who becomes her companion, of sorts, and her sounding board. 

Given the subtle racial tensions in this society as they are being played out every day in election commercials, articles, and conversations by the water coolers up and down the US, Miss Daisy, with her Southern Jewish values, slowly undergoes a change because she experiences some of her driver’s realities. For example, according to the laws in those days, people of color were not allowed to use a restroom at gas stations in the South. 

Once Miss Daisy experiences her own synagogue being bombed, a real paradigm shift takes place in her head. When Hoke informs her that she can’t go to the Temple, she responds in her usual Pavlovian manner: “Well, it’s a mistake. I’m sure they meant to bomb one of the conservative synagogues or the orthodox one. The Temple is reform. Everybody knows that.” 

When her driver responds, “It doan’ matter to them people. A Jew is a Jew to them folks. Jes like light or dark we all the same nigger,” Miss Daisy still refuses to believe it, but she eventually finds her way to attend a dinner in honor of Martin Luther King. While the old lady is beginning to change, her open-minded and generous son has second thoughts about any public support for a person of color. 

She teases her son: “The Werthan Company will go out of business if you attend the King dinner?” Challenged, the successful businessman then shares with her how vulnerable he feels: “A lot of the men I do business with wouldn’t like it. They wouldn’t come right out and say so. They’d just snicker and call me Martin Luther Werthan behind my back—something like that. And I’d begin to notice that my banking business wasn’t being handled by the top dogs. Maybe I’d start to miss out on a few special favors, a few tips. I wouldn’t hear about certain lunch meetings at the Commerce Club. Little things you can’t quite put your finger on…I still have to conduct business in this town.” 

He then asks his mother, “When did you get so fired up about Martin Luther King? Time was, I’d have heard a different story,” to which she replies in her contrarian manner, “Why, Boolie! I’ve never been prejudiced and you know it!” It’s at that moment that the driver says what might characterize both the situation in the past and in our own time: “Things changin’, but they ain’t change all dat much.” 

The old driver in some ways represents Everyman, who endures in spite of the forces that work against him. When his boss, Mr. Werthan, wishes Miss Daisy “Happy Thanksgiving,” he tells her, “Remember, Mama. [Florine’s] a Republican National Committee-woman now,” to which the now liberated Miss Daisy replies, full of contempt, “Good God!” 

The tough old lady also shows a caring side. For example, while planting flowers on her husband’s grave, Miss Daisy realizes that her chauffeur cannot read the gravestones. She immediately swings into action and teaches him to put individual letters together to spell. Later, at Christmas, one of the most moving scenes of the play takes place when she takes a small package wrapped in brown paper from her purse, assuring her driver that “This isn’t a Christmas present…You know I don’t give Christmas presents … I just happened to run across it this morning.” When the illiterate Hoke unwraps the package, he fights tears, looking at her gift for him, “Ain’ nobody ever give me a book,” and laboriously reading the cover, “Hand Writing Copy Book—Grade Five.” 

But just before he may become too sentimental, Miss Daisy reverts to her regular pattern of communication: “Jews don’t have any business giving Christmas presents. And you don’t need to go yapping about this to Boolie and Florine.” 

I was reminded of Mother Courage, who, like Miss Daisy, was not exactly a paradigm of virtue and gentleness; yet, audiences around the globe always admired her toughness and her feisty way of defying the world. Bertolt Brecht, who wanted his Mother Courage and her Children to be a didactic play that teaches about the forces of evil, rewrote her role numerous times to roughen up her character, and still the audiences loved her. 

The same is true for Uhry’s Miss Daisy: no matter how prickly and narrow-minded and suspicious she appears at times, her innermost goodness comes through powerfully. For example, when in her nineties, frail and helpless, and living in a retirement home, she takes Hoke’s hand and tells her former driver—now an old man who can’t drive any more but who still visits her as often as he can—that he is her “best friend.” He then cuts a small piece of the Thanksgiving pie and gently feeds her like his own child. 

Quite a few members of the audience laughed and cried many times during a performance that, as the discussions afterwards showed, reminded many theatre goers of our own times and those hidden forces that make people vote their fears and not their strengths, punch the screens of voting machines with old prejudices and not new visions. Miss Daisy, the former schoolteacher and her black chauffeur are still driving, not only on the stage of the Hedgerow, the oldest theatre in the Philadelphia area, but also in the minds of all those who opened up to one of the most moving plays in modern American drama. 

As a college professor who conducts a weekly workshop on “News Around the World” at Martins Run, America’s oldest Jewish retirement home, I asked myself, “and who is going to drive the many Miss Daisies and the many Hoke Coleburns of our own time to the election booth on November 4th?” 

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Driving Miss Daisy, Hedgerow Theatre (610) 565-4211
by Alfred Uhry
Directed by Peter Reynolds 

September 12-October 5, 2008 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Open letter to the President of the Muslim Women's Coalition and the President of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance

Salam and Shalom, dear Dr. Tasneem Shamim, dear Ms. Carol Kaufman Newman, 

Seeing the American premiere of Anna Ziegler’s Dov and Ali, produced by The Playwrights Realm and performed at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre in New York City, I thought of the train driver whom I met on a ride from Bombay to Igatpuri in India. He told me that, however inadvertently, he decapitates and mutilates the bodies of about half a dozen people each day, all year round: “I kill poor farmers who can’t feed their families any more and young women who have been raped and who are being rejected by their families or threatened with honor killings. These desperate people just wait behind bushes and then jump in front of my engine, but I can’t stop the train.” 

Given the battles and the wounds that we experienced throughout Ziegler’s latest play, I was moved by the trails left behind by emotionally scarred victims in a battle for the souls of young people, especially women.
The play introduces realities that hit hard when two cultures clash. I experienced Dov, a young and forever wavering English high school teacher as if he were a Jewish Hamlet—Prince, not of Denmark but of Illusions. His lifelong indecisions on practically everything, from not finishing his Ph.D. to eventually even quitting his job as an English high school teacher, lead him into a cul-de-sac with no hope but insipid daydreams scrawled on the walls of his mind, for example, when he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a successful rabbi, too, even though Dov has few convictions. 

Dov’s counterpart, Ali, his 17-year-old student, presents himself as a very stern young man who never smiles, the fervent son of an orthodox Muslim father who dominates his family in the American Midwest. With his menacing and threatening tone and his mock-subservient demeanor, created brilliantly by Ziegler, Ali clearly has the upper hand in this play. 

An arrogant young man, Ali is cock sure of his knowledge of Islam and Islamic traditions—all carbon copied statements of what his orthodox father told him, without a shred of the young man’s own thoughts: “See, I believe we should be governed by God because some decisions are too complicated to make on our own. I think we should look to our traditions as though they were maps. I think you think so too.” 

The young Muslim student, brought up on a diet of rigid thinking cannot fathom that there may be different ways of looking at a text, different ways of living one’s life, when he blurts out: “Why are there so many interpretations? I don’t see how one piece of text can mean so many things.” 

He reveres his father as the symbol of authority and thinks nothing of parroting his prejudices. When Dov casually acknowledges in class that he respects his father but does not always agree with him, Ali retorts, “Then you don’t respect him.” And when the doctrinaire young high school student gets accused of “being very limited in your definition of respect,” Ali shoots back what he really wanted to say all along: 

“I believe [. . .] that Israel shouldn’t exist. I believe it because my father believes it and his reasons are sound. He is a very reasonable man.” And as if that stab wasn’t enough, Ali then tries to goad his teacher with the yarmulka with another assertion about Israel, “The Jews stole it.” 

Jew-baiting is a sport that Ali plays only too well. When reprimanded for being rude, Ali replies: “Is there a law against rudeness in the Torah? Is it one of your ten commandments? Not to be rude?”

Though less rigid in his thinking, Dov finds himself equally bound by his tradition. His Jewish orthodox background and his chronic indecisiveness does not allow him to commit to his girl friend of two years. Sonya (Heidi Armbruster) is seen as a 30-year-old blond and blue-eyed Aryan shickse. She tries to connect with her colleague Dov, the man she wants to marry and for whom she is willing to convert to Judaism, even if religion doesn’t mean much to her. However, nothing comes of her hopes, as the young teacher is scared of offending his parents with a marriage to a non-Jewish woman. When Sonya wants to meet his parents, she pleads for his bridge building: 

“if you’d just let me meet your parents, I know I could make them like me. Or at least approve of me. Modern Orthodox Jews are modern for a reason, right?” 

However, the young orthodox high school teacher refuses to even talk to his parents about the woman he loves but fears to marry because of the restrains of the religious and cultural traditions with which he was brought up. 

Christians might look at the old Jesuit motto—“Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man"—except that this modern drama which found great resonance on the British stage last year and is currently experiencing its American premiere, shows that the turmoil of a one-sided upbringing of two sons, both of whom had fathers whose “love was opaque,” can do great damage to any individual, irrespective of the person’s religious or ideological upbringing. 

When men, including rabbis, place their careers above their relationships with their families, women and children could easily feel neglected. Dov admits that his mother had been bugging his father, the popular rabbi, to stop thinking only of others: “You have time for everyone else,” she says, “but not for me. And I’m your wife, I bore your children.” 

Dear Ms. Newman, dear Dr. Shamim, as I see both of you and your organizations as bridge builders, I was wondering whether you would be willing to see this play of clashing ideas with as many of your members, with as many young people as possible, and to engage in dialogues that could lead to important joint projects. 

Dov and Ali’s dramatic god-fathers seem to be two famous plays: Biedermann and the Arsonists by Max Frisch and Oleanna by David Mamet, both of which present antagonists who worm themselves into the lives of the protagonists—forever changing them. 

Recognizing that things are badly falling apart, the teacher in Ziegler’s latest play asks his student, “I don’t know what you want from me.” When Ali lectures him—“There’s nothing wrong with feeling certain, Mr. Gold!”—Dov gathers all his strength to ward off the attacker: “I can’t help but think that every word you say is some recycled, inferior version of something your father has said.” 

And when the teacher apologizes, he gets to hear, “I accept your apology. And I understand that it must be difficult for someone like you to talk to someone like me.” 

The playwright presents a wide range of interpersonal and ideological conflicts: Islam vs. Judaism, student vs. teacher, traditions vs. free thinking. Once the student has boxed his teacher into the corner where he wants him in that ring of power and control, Ali comes out with his deeply seated anti-Semitism: 

ALI: Don’t all Jews ask those sorts of questions—Who am I? Why am I here? What am I meant to do? 
DOV: Doesn’t everyone? 
ALI: No. 

The play powerfully demonstrates the contrast between different mindsets, different traditions, and how they both can lead to major problems: 

DOV: You don’t think there’s value in being open-minded? 
ALI: I think you’re talking about being uncertain, about walking around not knowing who you are, and that’s different than being open-minded. . . . With all due respect, Mr. Gold. 

And just as the young woman in Oleanna snares her professor in a linguistic net from which he cannot escape and verbally controls him, Ali knows exactly how to get to and goad his teacher: 

DOV: Ali, would you mind if we reschedule this conversation— 
ALI: Why – are you hung-over from the Sabbath? Was it a rage this weekend? 

And when the teacher assures his student that everything is fine and that he’ll be happy, Ali snaps back: “But that’s where you’re wrong. With all due respect, Mr. Gold—life isn’t about being happy. It’s about being right.” 

Triumphantly gloating, Ali puts his Jewish teacher down more than one peg: “I don’t want to believe, as my father would have me believe, that my teacher is an imbecile.” 

In the end, Dov, the young high school teacher, retreats, simply dissolves his relationship with his loving colleague and quits his job, without having found anything else he could do. Jobless and without his best friend, without any major convictions of his own, he suddenly wants to become a rabbi like his father, clinging to the star of David which turns out to be nothing but the straw of his mind. The most he does, like a child, is to murmur in his sleep the word “father” in Hebrew, “Aba, Aba, Aba.” 

In contrast to the two male characters, Sameh (Anitha Gandhi), Ali’s bright younger sister, acts not only as a character, but also weaves in and out of the play as the narrator. At times she appears like a ghostly voice, reminiscent of the spirit of Hamlet’s murdered father. We see her as a young woman who is forbidden to have views of her own, let alone take an active role in life. At times, she is almost serving the role of a classical Greek chorus, her hijab a living shroud. 
Sameh falls in love with a young Muslim student, bound for MIT, but who is not considered “a real Muslim” by Ali and his family. Unlike her brother, she feels pulled in different directions: she follows Muslim traditions while, at the same time, she also wants to come into her own. Befitting her role in life where she only plays a minor part, forced to be subservient to her father and her brother, she is not given a full role in the play either: 

“At home, I was reading so many novels, devouring them like candy because I felt that I too was a character in someone else’s story. Nothing seemed real.” 

Like many women in orthodox environments, she is being kept in the background. But when she speaks, either as Sameh or as a commentator, theatre goers who expect a traditional story line may get frustrated. In an almost Brechtian manner, she alienates the audience and chops apart the story line with her comments and reflections in between, thereby forcing the viewers to look at this drama of ideas from a disturbingly different perspective: 

“You’d think, given the circumstances, that this is where the story begins. It’s not. In fact, most stories have been going on forever, and this one is no different. And so we enter it in the middle.” 

Bertolt Brecht rewrote his Mother Courage many times because he wanted to prevent the audience from getting emotionally attached to the main character and thereby not think about the underlying issues that he wanted to present. Like Brecht, Ziegler roughened up the play in such a way that Sameh does not simply come across as a romanticized victim, a Muslim Ophelia, but as a figure who appears and disappears, a participant, a commentator on the events, or even a ghostlike narrator. The viewer, instead of getting lost in pathos, is confronted by a wide array of socio-cultural and interpersonal issues. 

Having been betrayed by Ali who leads his father and his male relatives to the place where his sister and her boyfriend were kissing, swift action follows: the teenager gets punished. Not even her mother can help her. In the words of Ali, “We let my mother out of her room. She screamed and sobbed. She rent her hair. She cursed us,” while the male family members arrange for the forced deportation of the young wayward Muslim girl, the 16-year-old high school student, who, against her will, is made to marry an old widower in Pakistan who wants children. 
Sameh despairs and does as she is told, feeling totally abandoned, alone in Pakistan, a foreign land for her: “I sit by the window and watch the women walk by like a flock of crows, or ghosts.” 
Ali comes to regret his involvement deeply: “I’ve lost my sister forever. I will never get her back and I will never forgive myself. Or my father.” 

On the website of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance one can find this brutally honest admission about the “agunah, the wife trapped in a dead marriage [. . .] one of the most painful challenges facing the Jewish community.” That statement could also have appeared on a website for Muslim women. The great grand daughters of Sarah and Hagar, it seems, share much the same pain from the same oppression, even today, even in contemporary America. 

Anna Ziegler has the courage to go where few playwrights dare to trod: exploring the explosive environment of Jewish and Islamic orthodoxy and the often devastating impact of religious ideologies on young people, especially when sacred texts and traditions are taken literally. 

It’s against this background that it may not come as a surprise to learn from the author about the genesis of Dov and Ali: “This play came from a number of places. First, I was teaching Lord of the Flies to my high school English class, as Dov is at the top of the play. I was working at a Jewish day school outside of Washington, DC, and was around a greater number of religious people than I ever had been (many of whom were Modern Orthodox, and served as inspiration for Dov and his family).” 

Given the many probing questions that Ali asks relentlessly of his teacher, I was wondering whether Ziegler’s English students influenced the portrayal of Ali, but she told me that he emerged from her imagination: “I tried to think of a way to write someone realistically who was so sure of things superficially but underneath has real doubt. There are boys in The Lord of the Flies who are like that, too—who are incredibly tough, even brutal, throughout the book, but crack open when they are saved at the end.” 

At a deeper level, though, the playwright, challenged by her orthodox environment in the DC area, “began to question things based on the experiences of my colleagues and students. How are we supposed to handle situations in which things we want directly conflict with what our religion is telling us to do or be?” 

Such questioning, refreshing as it is, can easily turn off those who consider any questioning useless or even blasphemous. However, I hope that you and the members of your two organizations will have the courage to continue to question and to keep dialogue open, not only within your own communities but with “the other” in those cultures and religions that appear different from yours.

The women who get forced into marriage and who lead lives of quiet desperation, the women and men who throw themselves in front of trains, may serve as a reminder that we have not done enough to build effective, meaningful bridges to our fellow human beings.

I left the theatre thinking about the impact of traditions on our own lives, and whether these traditions are destructive or whether they could serve as signposts. I walked through New York City, wondering about the play, about a statement the 16-year old Sameh had made: “A recurring dream Dov and Ali both have: a thousand old men are perched in the trees. They’re humming. If they stop, the world will fall away.”

Dear Dr. Tasneem Shamim, dear Ms. Carol Kaufman Newman,
I’d like to conclude my Open Letter to both of you with this quotation from the recent speech by President Obama at Cairo’s University. It may pull together many of the strings of this play and illuminate some of the issues that the grandchildren of Sarah and Hagar face in today’s world: 

“The Holy Quran tells us, 'Mankind, we have created you male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.’ The Talmud tells us, 'The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.' The Holy Bible tells us, 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.'” 

Shalom and Salam to both of you. Salam and Shalom to all the students who ought to see and discuss this important play—not only this week but in the years to come. 

Henrik Eger, Ph.D. 

www.henrikeger.com  

-------------------------------------------------
The American premiere production under the direction of Katherine Kovner can be seen in New York City till June 27, 2009. For tickets, contact or call 212-255-3089.
Interest in Dov and Ali is so great that the next production is already being prepared for a run at the Berkshires at the Chester Theatre, directed by Michelle Tattenbaum, July 1-12. Contact or call 413-354-7771. 

This letter was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

Metronome Ticking (Das tickende Metronom), a brutally honest yet uplifting docudrama—the only play in the world in which the son of a concentration camp survivor and the son of a Third Reich propaganda officer and war correspondent, stand next to each other on stage—will be performed in German for the first time on November 9 at the Hamburger Kammerspiele Theater from 11 to 1 pm. 

This performance is part of the nationwide 70th commemoration services of the infamous Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, when, all over Germany and Austria, synagogues were systematically burned, Jewish homes and businesses destroyed, and the deportation to the concentration camps accelerated in ever larger numbers.
Discovering Third Reich secrets 

Metronome Ticking came about when I asked my mother in Germany to send me my father’s many handwritten journals in which he had documented his life during the Third Reich on an almost daily basis. 

I knew from many accounts that my father, Ernst-Alfred Eger, known as Alf, was a lively, highly talented young writer who worked as a foreign correspondent in London before World War II, a propaganda officer in occupied France, in charge of the press in Cherbourg and the west of France, and later as a war correspondent in Russia, but that was about all. 

In spite of many conversations with my mother during my teenage years, I had no idea of my father’s involvement in the Third Reich, let alone that of my mother who consistently denied any involvement. 

My mother, however, always told me that when I was old enough, she would give me my father’s journals. As a youngster, I took one at random and forgot about it until, many years later, I opened it at random, and discovered an entry in which my dad gleefully described a visit to a local priest in 1935 during which the priest at the Catholic rectory happily told my father that he had been a member of the NSDAP (the Nazi party) for many years. 

At that moment I had a suspicion that there may be more information in those journals that would shed light on the inner workings of the worst time in German history. I therefore asked my mother to send me all of my father’s many journals and added, naively, that I wanted to publish excerpts. 

I regret that statement to this day because my mother subsequently took my father’s handwritten life work and threw all of his daily journals into an incinerator at the garbage disposal unit of her hometown. I was so upset that I could barely talk with her. 

Determined to write a play about this scenario, I then searched for photo albums that my mother had given me many years ago. In between those 20 or so old tomes I found half a dozen albums with handwritten love letters that my father had written to her and which, mercifully, my mother had forgotten, letters that made frequent references to the importance of my father’s daily diaries. 

Rescuing important texts from oblivion 

As I cannot read the old German Suetterlin handwriting, I almost despaired, but found the Suetterlinstube in Hamburg, an organization that transcribes old letters, diaries, and documents into modern German and sends the documents via MS Word documents to readers all over Germany and as far as Israel and the US. 

The seniors at the Suetterlinstube—under its coordinator, Dr. Peter Hohn—who already had worked on the writings of Holocaust survivors, went all out and faithfully transcribed the 500 letters my father had sent my mother from occupied France, a total of about 2000 pages. 

Once they arrived in Philadelphia via e-mail, I could not stop but read and highlight the best and the worst parts, ranging from funny, witty, highly original passages to devastating statements about making Europe “frei von dem Juden” (“free of the Jew”). 

I found myself laughing one moment and crying the next, learning a great deal about my parents and even the beginning of my life, but also feeling utter despair when I came across racist and anti-Semitic comments, such as, statements on what to do with Jews and the “racially mixed.” 

German-Jewish cooperation in Philadelphia, USA 

It was at that time, in the summer of 2006, that I met Bob Spitz in Philadelphia. His father, Fredl Spitz, an Austrian Jew, had been transported to Dachau and later to Buchenwald. Bob’s young mother, Lily Spitz, after some nerve-wracking experiences at the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, managed to get Fredl out of the concentration camps, just in time to take the last train out of Austria before the borders closed with the outbreak of World War II. After horrifying years, constantly being on the run, the little family survived and made it to the U.S., where Lily Spitz later wrote her memoirs. 

As soon as I read those haunting memoirs, I knew that I needed to change my play and, instead, base it on the survivor’s memoirs and my father’s personal writing. Many months of feverish editing and translating over two thousand pages led to the first performance of Metronome Ticking on Nov. 9, 2006 in the presence of quite a few Holocaust survivors at Martins Run in Media, America’s oldest retirement community. 

Various performances at synagogues followed, with many audience members crying and asking us many questions afterwards, and with lots of hugs all around. 

Inside the heart of Darkness 

Metronome Ticking, the docudrama, makes visible the process of language being used to conceal: Alf manipulates through censorship of the press in occupied France while Lily’s mother tries to find a way around the German censorship imposed on the inmates in a death camp near Minsk, omitting explicit details, while foreshadowing her own execution with the use of just one word: “Amen!” 

ALF: In Normandy, even though I write less than before, I now steer, lead, entice, manipulate, and mislead in order to head off the cross-flow of the French press. I am busy translating French articles; that is one of the main things that should bear fruits later. I negotiate with directors, with high ranking clergymen; I make many newspapers wastepaper basket-ripe, promote only a few daily papers, and play one against the other. In short, it is excessively interesting. 

Politically there’s a lot going on, more and more French activists are joining our plan. You know as well as I that the red vermin must be destroyed, and with it the gold kings [his code word for Jews]. 

LILY: The contact with our mothers was only interrupted while we were in Napoli in prison. We had no newspaper. All we knew was that the war was still going on. The only strange thing was that mother ended her letters and postcards with "AMEN". It disturbed me, but I had no explanation for it. One day a postcard came from a Gentile friend of my mother, to let me know, that my mother had also gone on "vacation" like so many of her friends. 

Now we understood: they were taken to concentration camps. When I read the card I started to shake. I had no control of my arms and legs and I could not speak coherently. 

Ironically, Alf, the German propaganda officer who once had manipulated as many influential French people as possible to join the “German mission,” later saw the result of that “mission” at a mass execution that he witnessed as a war correspondent in Russia. Afterwards, the man, once dedicated to Hitler and the Third Reich, no longer wanted to talk and even lost his will to live. In one of his last letters to my mother, the young Third Reich Faustus recognized that he had made a pact with the wrong Party, when he wrote: 

ALF: Read more than my letters. Read that which I did not write. Read that which could shatter my heart. 

The silence of the Jewish grandmother in Minsk echoed Alf’s silence on his last visit back home before he, too, got killed in Russia in the summer of 1944, at the age of 31. Interwoven with this theme of being confronted by harsh realities is Lily’s lifelong guilt for not having been able to rescue her mother. 

Both Alf and Lily are overcome by emotions and recognize that it’s too late. Yet, their two sons stand on the stage together—the sons of Abel and Cain—playing both their parents’ roles, even changing their roles, embracing each other, aware that we must be vigilant and never allow another Kristallnacht to happen again. 
Jewish and Christian Cooperation in Hamburg, Germany 

The various performances, co-sponsored by the Suetterlinstube and the Jewish Congregation of Hamburg, under the leadership of Board president Ruben Herzberg—a school principal and Middle East coordinator of the School Dept. of the Hamburg Senate where, among others, he arranges meetings between Jewish and Palestinian organizations—will also include a performance at the Thoraschule, now the Jewish Community Center of Hamburg, a community that is made up largely of Russian immigrant families but which also has many students from other schools who will attend the event on Nov. 10, a performance at the famous Ansgarkirche, and a farewell performance at the Walddörfer-Gymnasium, a Hamburg high school. 

The first performance on Nov. 7 will take place at the Ansgarkirche (church) where Anita Ree, a Jewish artist had been commissioned in the early 1930s to paint the Ansgar Triptych. The church elders at that time, however, withdrew the offer for “cultic reasons” when they found out that her parents were Jewish, even though she had been baptized as a Christian. Hounded out of the Hamburg Artist’s League because of her ancestry, she committed suicide in 1933.
Pastor Tobias Götting, the minister at the Ansgarkirche today, takes an active stand on discrimination issues, and organizes annual programs on the pogroms of November 9 in memory of the victims of the Nazi period—of those who had no chance. He even refused to have an old brick swastika removed from the church tower as a symbol of evil and a daily reminder of the past and the lack of support for one’s fellow human beings during the Third Reich. We will read the first German performance of Metronome Ticking next doors to the copies of the burned originals of Anita Ree’s art work at the Ansgar church. 

The songs in Hebrew, German, English, and French that accompany the play will be sung by Hanna Wehner of Krefeld, Germany, whose father, a young worker for the post office in Celle during WWII, passed the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp daily and secretly threw clothing and food over the fence until his wife threatened him with divorce as there was little left in their home. He then asked for donations from the postal workers in Celle and they chipped in so he could continue throwing his food and clothing packages over the fence, until he was drafted and sent to Russia where he died young, just like my father. 

Metronome Ticking ends with the “Healing song” by Aryeh Hirschfield, sung in both English and Hebrew, followed by “Hevenu Shalom Alechem” peace be with you—moving from a dirge-like rendering to a joyful song that invites everyone to join in, ending a docudrama that encourages the audience to respect others in their otherness, aware that, ultimately, we have much more in common than anything that might separate us. 

The son of the Jewish concentration camp prisoner and the son of the German propaganda officer during the Third Reich who have become friends in Philadelphia, will stand next to each other on the stage of the Kammerspiele in the former Jewish quarter of Hamburg, the hometown of Alf Eger, with the metronome of consciousness ticking, even now, 70 years after the horrendous event. 

May we always listen to our innermost voice and act accordingly. May we always be there for each other. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, November 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

While driving from Philadelphia to Michigan, I found it difficult to imagine a conference that could match last year's spectacular International Theatre Conference in Vienna, Austria. However, the Association for Jewish Theatre (AJT) and the Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s (JET) Artistic Director Evelyn Orbach ensured that this year’s conference in Detroit brought together some of the best Jewish and pro-Jewish theatre professionals and board members from the US and Canada, and from as far as Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Tel Aviv, who conducted many engaging workshops, eye-opening performances, challenging seminars, and one enlightening discussion after another. 

Because of the diversity and caliber of their work, I witnessed a range of outstanding performances and a depth of discussion that at times challenged me deeply. 

Every morning, some conference participants met to hear Michael Posnick present texts by Martin Buber and other philosophers, leading to deep discussions about the spiritual aspect of theatre. Ellen Schiff’s presentation on how actors and playwrights could draw upon a collective experience or “racial memory,” forced me to grapple with issues of race and identity. Her talk challenged me, because whenever I think about the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, I juxtapose it with the possibility that any so-called racial and cultural identifiers might be little more than social constructs. 

I was also intrigued by Rick Stein’s report about the recent IsraDrama Festival, where many Israeli playwrights tackled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head-on. It seems that the opposite takes place in the United States, where in the absence of large subsidies, commercial success often dictates the choice of plays, and political theatre suffers. 

However, JET did not shy away from controversy when they presented one of the conference’s most thought-provoking events: their performance of a scene from Women’s Minyan by Naomi Ragen, which turned the small stage in Detroit into a classical Greek theatron—a “watching place.” Here, the audience witnessed the anguish of one soul after another, as her plot took us deep into the heart of Orthodox darkness, showing ten women of all ages who each suffered differently under the confines of strictly-interpreted and enforced Judaic laws—an extraordinary play that succeeded in making audiences cry in theatres as far apart as Jerusalem and Detroit today. 

For the conference’s Playwrights’ Forum, I hoped to dramatize these challenging themes and ideas, tying in notions of race and ideology in a scene from Mendelssohn Does Not Live Here Anymore. Like Women’s Minyan, which Ragen based on real-life incidents, writing about one’s own family or group presents many difficulties, especially when their actions are anything but praiseworthy. However, through the use of documents and other historical sources from the Third Reich, including letters from my father, I hoped to show that labeling other people racially—in this case, Jewish people that are considered “vermin”—can bring about disastrous consequences for both the abusers and the abused. 

I owe a great deal to the many people who made this conference an extraordinary event, including Norman Fedder, Diane Gilboa, Mira Hirsch, Ralph Meranto, Rick Stein, Kayla Gordon, and of course, the staff and many volunteers at JET. Organized by Moti Sandak and Howard Rypp, a future conference will take place in Israel for the first time. This non-Jewish writer has always wanted to say goodbye with a famous Jewish farewell. On the last day in Detroit, and for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to say to some of the most extraordinary theatre people one could possibly meet: “Till next year in Jerusalem.” I felt damn good in saying it. And I felt deeply connected. ​

This article was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, March 2007. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​I never thought I would witness the day when I would see Anne Frank liberated, alive in the city of brotherly love: Anne Frank, remembered as the author of the world’s most famous diary and as the heroine of historical dramas and films, the girl who inspired countless period pieces, performed in schools all over the country.

Teachers in many cities insisted that students see the story of Anne Frank on stage—generally with a whole host of characters—and more than one administrator in parochial and public schools in the United States insisted on censoring the well-known section where the girl in hiding describes her body parts. In short, millions of theatre-goers and film audiences were exposed to edited versions that presented more of a famous historical character than Anne Frank, the teenager.

Anne and Anna: The New Multi-Cultural and International Theatre In Between

Not so in Philadelphia, where Anna Watson, a young German actress who recently moved to the United States, performs Teenager: Anne Frank, a play that she has put together based on Anne Frank’s writing. This piece allows us to really see the adolescent come alive, complete with her ups and downs, including those scenes that Anne’s father had excised when the first edition of the diary was published in 1947, namely the confrontations between the teenager and her mother—scenes that countless young girls experience when they go through puberty.

I have seen theatrical versions of the life of Anne Frank edited, directed, and performed in many different ways but never like this production by the new multi-cultural and international Theatre InBetween . Richard Watson, the Jamaica-born producer and executive director of the fledgling company married Anna, his German high-school sweetheart of twelve years whom he met when she had a scholarship to study in the US for one year. The director, German TV, film, radio, and theatre actor Frank Brückner had also moved to the US recently and is married to Lise Raven, an award-winning writer and director, who teaches film at Drexel University. Anti-Semitism forced Lise’s mother, along with her sisters and parents, to flee Nazi Germany.

What distinguishes this production from other Anne Frank plays is the fact that we see a contemporary Anne, who takes us on a roller coaster of feelings, thoughts and adolescent experiences, all against the backdrop of the pitch-black Philadelphia skyline. The performance takes place on a roof of the thirteen-story Parkway House, built by the first female architect in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Fleisher, along with co-designer Gabriel Roth, “in homage to Art Deco and international styles.” The stunning view of the gleaming lights and the extravagant buildings of the city’s skyline from this historical Pennsylvania Avenue building—diagonally across from the famous Philadelphia Museum of Art—represents a future that was denied Anne: a human being, a teenage girl, German, Jewish, and, above all, a real Mensch.
This production is the most transparent one I have ever seen, both physically and dramatically. The Achterhuis, that secret Annex or hiding place on top of a building in Amsterdam, becomes an 8-foot-by-8-foot white cube made of PVC piping, a space filled with nothing but a little table, a tiny mirror, Anne’s handbag with photographs of her favorite actors and a little stuffed animal inside. It is so wholly modern in design that Anne becomes contemporary. She even wears a girlish pink cardigan with appliqué roses and an aquamarine tank-top underneath—the kind of clothing that teenagers these days are wearing all over America.

Young German Theatre Artists Search for Anne Frank in Philadelphia

Anna Watson, who has performed in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, had read The Diary of Anne Frank many times and decided some years ago to compile the best and the most relevant teenager portions of the diary and arrange them in a such a way that the audiences would have a chance to get deep inside the soul of this extraordinary teenager in occupied Holland. When Watson had performed her play in Vienna, it was still halfway between a period piece and a modern play.
After she had met Frank Brückner by chance at Philadelphia’s Tuscany Café, she decided to go one step further and remove any aspects of her prior performance that would make Anne Frank a museum piece, inaccessible for a young, contemporary audience. Rather than paying their respect to the extraordinary life of this remarkable girl in an historical, and thus confining, setting, both the young director and the actress from Germany decided to liberate Anne Frank and give her a place in our own time.

Watson told me that after she moved to Philadelphia, “I was busy being homesick one day, but then I decided to sign up for the  Philadelphia Fringe Festival because I wanted to move forward and this society very much encourages individual initiative.” And so, she and first-time director Frank Brückner worked together for many months. Clearly, all the collaborative work paid off.

In this production, which showcases Brückner and Watson’s first foray into English-speaking theatre, both the actress and the director even toyed with the idea of having Anne Frank use a cell phone and record her diary on a voice recorder. However, they both decided that they wanted nothing to distract the audience from the joy and the turmoil in the life of the teenager who was locked up in a tiny space on top of the building at Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht 267, a history-heavy street where many years later, Richard Watson, the executive director of Theatre InBetween, lived in a building near the Anne Frank House as an exchange student at the University of Amsterdam.

Teenager: Anne Frank

The play begins with a long Pinteresque pause, which can be unnerving for newcomers to the theatre. On the other hand, it creates a tension in the viewers who recognize that they are being transported into a different world. Once Anne swings into action, she walks right up to that little mirror affixed to one of the pipes and, looking at herself, becomes aware of the changes she is undergoing. Full of anticipation and joy, she applies lipstick, wanting to be pretty for Peter, “the only boy I’m going to see for a long time.” This “mirror, mirror on the wall” scene, from the very beginning, engages the viewers and connects to the lives of countless adolescents who are experiencing the same excitement that, 66 years ago, Anne, the fourteen-year-old, did.

She continues contemplating her blossoming romance: “Isn’t it important for every girl, when she gets her first kiss?” No sooner has she presented her thoughts and her defiance when she asks, “Do you think Father and Mother would approve of a girl my age sitting on a divan and kissing a seventeen-and-a-half year old boy? I doubt they do.” Anne’s rebelliousness comes through powerfully, most likely making countless adolescents feel heard and understood when she ponders, “Why should we ask anyone’s permission?” She concludes, “Sharing our thoughts with each other requires a great deal of trust, but we’ll both be stronger because of it.” Anne, very aware of her physical development but also her intellectual and emotional strength, wrote, full of confidence, “Everyday I feel myself maturing.”

This production reminded me, in some ways, of Spring Awakening, with its emphasis on the transformation of adolescents into young adults. A Children’s Tragedy, as Wedekind’s play was subtitled, can also apply to the life of the historical Anne Frank, even though Teenager: Anne Frank exudes a joy rarely matched by other productions of Anne Frank.

Young Germans Liberating Anne Frank

When I heard the actress say, “I was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany,” I thought that Anna Watson, and not Anne Frank, was talking about her own life. However, once she continued, “A few years later, my family emigrated to Amsterdam, Netherlands,” I knew that we were still following the life of one of the most talented young writers of her time, and, certainly, the most widely read young diarist of the twentieth-century: “Hitler invaded Holland in 1940. The Dutch surrendered, the Germans arrived, and the trouble started for the Jews.”

German is used sparingly but powerfully, for example when Anne juxtaposes the “German Wehrmacht Berichte and the English BBC.” Or, when she, in very vivid ways, imitates her mother with her voice taking on an ice-cold tone, a fourteen-year-old teenager rebelling against her mother: “Anne! Nein! But there’s not a soul in the building! That doesn’t matter. You can’t go down those stairs. Never?! . . . Nein! Not even then. It’s too dangerous.” Anne then lets loose a whole cavalcade of diatribes against her mother, walking around like a caged animal: “I can’t talk to her. I can’t look lovingly into those cold eyes. I can’t. Not ever! If she had even one quality an understanding mother is supposed to have, gentleness or friendliness or patience, or something, I’d keep trying to get closer to her—it’s becoming more and more impossible every day!” Then Anne’s indefatigable spirit comes through like a rainbow after a storm, “But no one can lock up my imagination.”

Anna Watson presented the mother with such a cold tone that I almost got frightened, especially with her sharp, staccato-like series of “Nein!” followed by commands of what was allowed and what was verboten. At the same time, the German actress also managed, within split seconds, to switch masterfully into the role of the young adolescent who couldn’t understand why it was important to live under self-imposed restrictions—this constant back-and-forth brought to life a scene with which many young people can easily identify.

After the outburst of feelings vis-à-vis her mother, Anne changes into a more pensive mood. Her energy level waxes and wanes in countless ways through gestures, facial expressions, body language, and a great variety of vocal tones, punctuated by reflective silences. In between those pauses, I saw a fellow human being, fighting against family customs and traditions, like wearing slippers and taking piano lessons: “Just think of the fight with Mother over my slippers. I’d rather die than wear slippers, I said. But I still had to put them on in the end.” One could hear chuckling in the audience.

Full of exuberance, the feisty teenager relishes her small victories: “So you see, as long as we’re here, I don’t ever have to wear slippers again. Isn’t that great?! . . . and piano lessons! No, now I don’t have to practice anymore! I’ll tell you, I’ll be living like a queen.” More laughter waved through the audience. However, little did Anne Frank know that not too long after that defiant and exuberant diary entry, she and the entire household would be betrayed and deported to Auschwitz and eventually carted off to Bergen-Belsen.

Unexpectedly foreshadowing Anne’s fate, Anna froze in her tracks when a helicopter flew over Philadelphia’s Parkway. She listened as if it had been a Luftwaffe plane flying over occupied Amsterdam. And then, spoken into the silence of the night, “It’s the silence that frightens me most. Every time I hear a creak in the house, or a step on the street, I’m sure they’re coming for us.”

Anne, brutally aware of her environment, reflected on the impact of politics on their lives from the perspective of a teenager: “Arguing so much about politics is just plain stupid! Let them laugh, swear, make bets, grumble and do whatever they want as long as they stew in their juice. But don’t let them argue, since that only makes things worse.” She even addresses the audience directly, asking them, “What is the point of the war?”

Clearly, Anne sets herself apart from the adults, not as a child, but as an adolescent with her own set of values, including criticism of the adults in her little world: “And so it goes from early in the morning to late at night: the funny part is that they never get tired of it.” Anne, getting a bit frustrated about this nonstop survival talk of the adults, criticizes the elders in typical Anne Frank fashion: “One broadcast, two at the most, should be enough to last the entire day. But no, those old nincompoops . . .” She stops and—like Gilda Radnor, the famous American comedienne of the early Saturday Night Live program—ends with “Never mind, I’ve already said it all.”

Clearly, Anne had not said it all: “Oh, why are people so crazy?” she asks, full of wonderment. And then shares her eternal optimism with us: “I look upon life in hiding as an interesting adventure, full of danger and romance, and every privation an amusing addition to my diary.”

“No One Knows Anne’s Better Side.”

Building up to a most moving final scene, Anna abruptly turns off her many joyful facial expressions and her lively movements and almost transforms into a walking pillar of salt when she stares into the void, her face eerily distorted, aware of what lies ahead of her. Walking forward slowly, as if to talk to the anti-Semitic officer, she affirms, “No one knows Anne’s better side.”

When the actress slowly leaves the cube, the audience is left with an awareness of the plight of teenager Anne Frank and perhaps the plight of countless teenagers around the world who suffer discrimination and persecution. On opening night, after a minute of silence, the audience broke out into a long, supportive applause and gave both Anna and Anne a standing ovation and with it the director and the stage designer.

Audience Responses to the Liberated Anne Frank

The responses from the audience were most enthusiastic, ranging from “Wow. Anne Frank no longer is a period piece but a thoroughly modern play” to “Hope in a hopeless situation” as Gregory Wolmart put it. Karen Fzesq was moved deeply by Anna’s “powerful silent scream” at the end of the play, and Chrissy Erickson wrote: “I realized that Anne’s voice is still alive, even though she died. Her voice lives on.”

The production brought out a wide range of thoughtful responses, including this international perspective: “This play reminded me of the lives of girls and young women in villages of Afghanistan where the Taliban or village elders are preventing girls from leaving the house” as Lise Raven observed: “Anne is less of an historical figure and more of an everyday girl.”

Maria Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Film at the University of the Arts, added, “If it helps us to become more aware of the human rights abuses against girls and women worldwide, this play would, apart from anything else, already have achieved a great deal.”

Lesley Barth, who has performed with a Yale comedy group at the Annenberg Center recently, commented, “I was struck by the mixture of the extraordinary and the ordinary—how Anne is not only a symbol, but a real human being.”
Following the opening night’s performance, Randi Boyette of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was impressed by what she had witnessed and shared with the director, the producer, and the actress that she would like to see this production performed in schools and synagogues. “In addition to a wonderful performance,” Boyette said, “Anna’s German accent lends authenticity to the role.”

When I asked the ADL representative what she thought about a young German director and a young German actress not only performing but interacting with audiences in American synagogues, she didn’t hesitate with her answer: “That’s a plus. Especially as this is such an extraordinary production.” However, she wanted to make sure that the play was short enough so that there would be enough time for Q&A sessions to allow young people to learn more about Anne Frank, the historical character, and Anne, the teenager.

The Anne and Anna Partnership on Philadelphia’s Parkway: A Great Success
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This play, which marks the birthday of Theatre InBetween in the US as part of the 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe, has added two additional dates and will run until September 20th. Teenager: Anne Frank could easily make it to the famous Edinburgh Fringe, the biggest arts festival in the world, next year—an event that could lead to many more performances here and abroad. I can visualize the headlines in the international press next summer: BREAKING NEWS: Anne Frank, Alive in Europe. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.