That horrific state of affairs occurred in 1943 to Sophie Scholl, a scholar on the University of Munich and anti-Nazi activist within the White Rose motion.
Scholl and the White Rose have been the themes of films, docudramas, performs, and books. In 2015, playwright and actor David Meyers wrote We Will Not Be Silent, a play concerning the final brutal days of Scholl and her brother Hans. After a developmental interval, the play premiered in 2017 and was produced at Boca Raton’s Theatre Lab in 2019.
With GableStage producing and inventive director Bari Newport on the helm, We Will Not Be Silent is getting a brand new manufacturing when the braveness to face as much as tyrants appears more and more pressing.
Scholl embraced Nazi youth organizations as a toddler, as did her brother, regardless of the objections of their father, Robert, who was later imprisoned for making an anti-Hitler comment to one among his staff. The Scholl household was Lutheran. We Will Not Be Silent is not a Holocaust play per se, although there’s a line concerning the doubtful declare that the Nazis have been “relocating” the Jewish inhabitants.
Soon, the siblings and their scholar mates started rejecting Nazi ideology, and Sophie targeted on faith, philosophy, educating kids, and the humanities. She additionally grew to become lively within the White Rose because the group discovered methods to get its pamphlets calling for resistance distributed in cities all through Germany.
Facts about Scholl’s too-short life — she was guillotined on the age of 21 — are woven into We Will Not Be Silent. But Meyers has chosen to deal with the extreme, scary few days when a Nazi interrogator tried to get Scholl to admit to treason.
Scholl’s precise inquisitor was a Gestapo member named Robert Mohr. Meyers has made the character a former policeman named Kurt Grunwald (Jason Peck), a person who shifts between good cop and dangerous cop a number of instances throughout the play.
Sophie (Meredith Casey) begins the play fiercely screaming, flattening a semi-transparent banner painted with graffiti urging Germans to behave towards the Nazi regime. Moments later, she seems distraught and chained to a fats golden pillar. Grunwald fake apologizes as he removes her handcuffs and awkwardly stuffs the banner virtually out of sight.
What then unfolds on designer Frank J. Oliva’s mysterious set — its tiled partitions and ground vaguely counsel a sort of cage — is a session full of debates, lies, makes an attempt at persuasion, deprivation, and torment, each psychological and bodily.
At first, Casey’s Sophie, her purple hair accomplished in youthful braids, claims to know nothing of the White Rose, and her demeanor is pretty convincing. Peck’s Grunwald tries convincing her that he is open to believing her innocence and her brother’s. But earlier than lengthy, he pulls proof from a folder and begins turning invisible screws as an nameless Nazi watches from behind a window, documenting the dialogue in his notes.
Sophie is disadvantaged of meals, water, and relaxation, and as Grunwald tries to steer her that the others can be tried and executed, she tries to exonerate them by shouldering the blame. Grunwald is aware of higher, and in a single terrible, protracted scene, he forces her to face together with her again towards the wall and her ft straight till her physique begins shaking uncontrollably.
Jason Peck, as Kurt Grunwald, removes the handcuff tethering a frightened Meredith Casey as Sophie Scholl.
Photo by Magnus Stark
Hans (Bobby Eddy) does make an look, coming into the area as an exhausted Sophie is mendacity fitfully on the ground. Whether he’s actual or an imaginary presence born of her despair, this model of her brother is hale and hearty, which appears odd given Sophie’s situation.
Emotionally, Casey has essentially the most to work with within the forged, and also you ache for Sophie when she makes statements that may clearly doom her. Peck’s portrayal of Grunwald is a lot the low-key “peculiar” German that it is arduous to purchase him as a person who could assist deliver Sophie’s life to an abrupt finish.
GableStage’s artistic group has made the world of We Will Not Be Silent an eerie one with whispering voices and unsettling music from sound designer Jason Peck. Victoria Murawski’s lighting is, by turns, harsh and haunting. Costume designer Camilla Haith clothes Casey and Eddy within the form of interval clothes Sophie and Hans wore, and Peck’s nondescript three-piece swimsuit abruptly appears to be like extra sinister with the addition of a swastika armband.
Meyers’s script is a component dialogue, half drama. That makes Newport’s job as director all of the harder: A 90-minute play feels longer than it’s, and the stress flows and ebbs in a narrative that ought to have extra of it.
If you do not know Sophie Scholl’s story, We Will Not Be Silent could encourage you to study extra. And with its chilling modern resonance, the play can also function a reminder that the braveness to oppose tyranny is not relegated to at least one second in historical past.
– Christine Dolen, ArtburstMiami.com
We Will Not Be Silent. Through Sunday, January 29, at GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables; 305-445-1119; gablestage.org. Tickets price $45 to $75.