Callum Scott Howells in “Cabaret” on the West End. (Photo by Marc Brenner)
“Remember this!”
That has been the pressing cry coming from New York and London levels this season. No fewer than 10 performs prior to now 10 months have addressed the specter of Nazism and the rise of antisemitism with such depth that it’s inconceivable to not take discover and heed the warning.
Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski was one of many first on the topic, final fall at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. There had been already warnings from the New York stage late final winter. In February, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, directed by David Cromer on the Manhattan Theatre Club, was the earliest in 2022 to handle the alarming rise of antisemitism—in its case, in France, the house of the playwright’s ancestors. Set in Paris in 2016-17, with flashbacks to 1944-46, the play offers with the deliberation of a French household on whether or not they need to keep or depart, given the latest assault on the kippah-wearing patriarch of the household, who returns one afternoon with a bloody face after an act of aggression. “It’s the suitcase or the coffin,” he declares, because the household faces the grave query of what it means to be Jewish in France right now. Appeasement and assimilation might not be choices in these turbulent instances.
It’s onerous to think about that Jews right now are going through the query of whether or not to go away or keep, in both Europe or the U.S. But with the dramatic rise of antisemitic hate in recent times, there’s unquestionable trigger for concern. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2021 was the best 12 months on document of harassment, vandalism, and violence directed in opposition to Jews because the group began taking statistics over 40 years in the past. That represented a 34 % improve over the earlier 12 months, and the top of a marked five-year improve within the variety of antisemitic incidents, highlighted by the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2016, the lethal assault on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 that left 11 useless, and the hostage-taking on the Texas synagogue in Colleyville in January 2022. The American Jewish Committee reported that one out of each 4 American Jews has been the topic of antisemitism in 2021. Remarkably, the U.Okay.’s Community Security Trust reported the very same improve—34 %—in antisemitic incidents in 2021 throughout the United Kingdom within the earlier 12 months. Can it actually be occurring once more?
“America was our promised land, but we might not be safe here anymore,” the artist Deborah Kass just lately wrote. “When to leave? That’s the question every Jew has embedded in our DNA.” Just this previous October, through the High Holy Days, the Washington Post reported {that a} rabbi requested his Washington, D.C., congregation: “How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room table where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?” His assertion was delivered in the identical month when main incidents from Albany, N.Y., to Brooklyn to Tempe, Ariz., to Los Angeles featured antisemitic indicators, fliers, threats, and outright bodily violence.
No marvel, then, that New York and London levels are providing full-voiced, vigorous responses to this rising disaster.
Whether to remain or depart was the query that the younger singing group known as the Comedian Harmonists selected to disregard in Weimar Germany. Harmony, a musical by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman that ran on the Museum of Jewish Heritage in April 2022, tells the story of this sextet of widespread singers, comprising three Jews and three Christians, whose fame within the late Twenties and Thirties prolonged past their Berlin base. Emboldened by their worldwide success, the group ignored warnings and returned to Germany to carry out, regardless of the Nazis’ growing efforts to make the group’s life tougher. Their persecution continued till the group’s closing live performance in Hanover, Germany, in March 1934. Thereafter they had been prohibited from performing in public, their recordings had been destroyed, and the group disbanded.
Tom Stoppard addresses the difficulty of assimilation head-on in his masterpiece Leopoldstadt, which opened in London simply earlier than the pandemic and was remounted in New York final September (it’s nonetheless operating). In this five-act epic, Stoppard tells the story of a affluent, elitist Jewish Viennese household who convert to Catholicism to assimilate. Spanning 5 a long time from 1899-1955, the play follows the household by means of a number of generations through the rise of Nazism, with a devastating Act IV set on the eve of Kristallnacht, when Nazis invade their stately residence and provides them the ultimatum to be packed and prepared for deportation by the next midday.
The energy of Leopoldstadt is multilayered in that it’s Stoppard’s reimagining of his household historical past had they by no means fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. After his household’s escape to the Far East when he was 18 months previous, his widowed mom made her option to England, the place Stoppard (born Tomáš Sträussler) took his stepfather’s title, assimilated into the British creative elite, and rose to fame. Though he suspected he had Jewish roots, it wasn’t till he was 60 that Stoppard realized that every one 4 of his Jewish grandparents had perished within the Holocaust. It took greater than 20 years for him to put in writing about it.
Knowing this autobiographical dimension of Leopoldstadt, Act V, set after the struggle in 1955, is sort of too painful to look at. In it, a survivor—a younger English author assimilated into the British tradition, representing Stoppard himself—returns to Vienna to be confronted by a cousin, who tells him of his household’s destiny within the Nazi dying camps. “It can’t happen again,” the younger Englishman says to his cousin. As Stoppard instructed The New York Times in a latest interview: “It’s almost a foolish remark now. Whereas when the play was being written, I didn’t think of it as being a foolish remark.” In retrospect, Stoppard stated that writing the play was “an act of self-reproach.”
Several different productions this previous fall centered on precise traumatic occasions in American historical past associated to antisemitism. In November, the Encores collection featured a strong revival of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Tony-winning Parade, directed by Michael Arden. Set in Atlanta in 1913, it tells the true story of Leo Frank, a younger Jewish manufacturing facility superintendent unjustly accused of murdering a 13-year-old worker. Frank (in an affecting efficiency by Ben Platt) was wrongly convicted, and his sentence was commuted from capital punishment to life imprisonment. But whereas serving time, he was kidnapped from his cell by a bunch of armed males and lynched in Marietta, Ga., in 1915. (The manufacturing will get a full Broadway run beginning Feb. 21.)
A couple of days after Parade got here a brand new play uncovering one other painful chapter of American historical past. Playwright Bess Wohl instructed the little-known story of the German American Bund, a corporation energetic within the late Thirties that established summer time sports activities camps throughout the U.S. to indoctrinate youth of German descent into Nazism. Entitled Camp Siegfried, after an precise camp positioned in Yaphank, Long Island, it tells the story of two youngsters who meet there in the summertime of 1938, fall in love, and are ultimately radicalized, with life-changing penalties. Deftly directed by David Cromer at Second Stage, it provided scary warning with up to date resonances—particularly, to “never underestimate your infinite capacity for delusion.”
Camp Siegfried adopted on the heels of play additionally coping with younger folks and the devastation of Nazism. Set in France throughout World War II, This Beautiful Future by Rita Kalnejais on the Cherry Lane Theatre in September (directed by Jack Serio) featured one other romance, this time between a French lady and a younger German soldier infatuated with killing, as their older selves look again in rueful retrospection.
If there’s any glimpse of hope within the above-mentioned performs, it lies within the capability for particular person heroism within the face of the forces of darkness. In Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, authors Clark Young and Derek Goldman inform the story of a Polish diplomat in World War II, recruited by the Polish underground to report the horrors of the continuing Holocaust to the West. Karski risked his life to go to the Warsaw Ghetto and a focus camp, then made secret studies on his findings that had been handed on to the Allies. When Karski traveled to England and the U.S. to report in particular person to Prime Minister Anthony Eden and President Roosevelt, neither chief was satisfied to intervene. The co-authors drew on Karski’s personal phrases to create a solo present, carried out by David Straithairn with ardour, conviction, and dignity. Despite the last word failure of his mission, Karski stands as a lesson in heroism for our personal present instances of disaster. “Each individual has infinite capacity to do good, and an infinite capacity to do evil,” the play’s Karski stated. “We have a choice.”
If any comparability or distinction may be made about how this subject material is being addressed on the New York and London levels, it lies within the radical theatrical steps that British administrators have taken to name consideration to the rising disaster. In final fall’s manufacturing of C.P. Taylor’s 1982 play Good on London’s West End, director Dominic Cooke heightened the drama in regards to the seduction of Nazism to an excessive. The story offers with the conversion of a German educational named Professor Halder—a benign, seemingly “good” man, performed brilliantly by David Tennant—right into a radical Nazi and a vigorous participant within the execution of genocide. Cooke sharpened the drama by paring down the manufacturing to 3 principal actors, two of whom play a number of roles. The motion thus careened from one brief scene to the subsequent with intense velocity as performers change elements instantly. This all constructed to probably the most surprising, gorgeous coups de theatre I’ve seen in recent times, as if the director, on this closing second, was completely intent that we “remember this.”
Even extra radically theatrical was Robert Icke’s The Doctor on the West End (scheduled to come back to New York’s Park Avenue Armory in June 2023). Known for his daring reimagining of classics, from the Oresteia to Hamlet to 1984), Icke right here tailored Schnitzler’s 1912 play Professor Bernhardi, about a physician who refuses to grant a Catholic priest a closing visitation to a 14-year-old affected person dying from a self-administered abortion. The physician’s medical and moral stance at first appears justifiable, on condition that the dad and mom can’t be reached for permission and the physician fears the affected person would possibly die of fright upon seeing the priest. But the physician quickly turns into a sufferer of vicious antisemitic assaults and political persecution by her colleagues, with devastating outcomes. In Icke’s mind-bending adaptation (which he additionally directed), the play grew right into a problem of our elementary assumptions of human id, not solely pertaining to faith but additionally to race and gender. Not solely did he change the gender of Schnitzler’s male physician (performed right here by the wonderful Juliet Stevenson, he cross-cast actors in roles in order that nobody was who they gave the impression to be by way of gender, race, or faith. It was an alternatingly sensational and mind-boggling journey, each intellectually difficult and emotionally draining.
If this refrain of productions about Nazism and antisemitism has been constructing to a full crescendo on the London and New York levels over the previous 12 months, it’s solely becoming {that a} revival of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret is operating on the West End. This oft-revived 1966 hit appears to embody all of the cumulative ardour, vitality, and urgency being expressed by the others. Director Rebecca Frecknall has gone all out to sensationalize the depravity of pre-Nazi Berlin in 1929-1930 because the Nazis start their ascent to energy, starting with the reconfiguration of the West End’s Playhouse Theatre into the notorious Kit Kat Klub (a metaphor for the Weimar Republic) the place the motion takes place. Audience members are guided by means of a again door, as clients would presumably have entered the membership on the time, then by means of basement corridors right into a entrance foyer the place lewdly costumed singers and dancers are already deep into the “in-your-face” leisure (the dazzling choreography is by Julia Cheng). The inside the theatre auditorium has been reconfigured into the spherical by designer Tom Scott, with an outstanding orchestra on both balcony. As a louche Emcee of the Kit Kat Klub (Callum Scott Howells, following Eddie Redmayne within the function) emerges from the theatre ground, he rotates across the stage on a turnstile together with the writhing dancers in a frenzy of hedonism. It’s an unforgettable spectacle of a society at its lowest level of debauchery and degradation, about to reemerge as a monstrous Nazi phoenix from the ashes.
As the story unfolds of an odd assortment of souls thrown collectively by historical past, Cabaret affords a daunting imaginative and prescient of the darkish future that lies forward for Germany—and the world. You depart the theatre with the terrifying “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” nonetheless ringing in your ears.
What the theatre is telling us, loud and clear, is that tomorrow is right now. Said David Cromer, director of each Prayer for the French Republic and Camp Siegfried: “I’ve been exposed to antisemitism all my life. I grew up in Skokie, Ill., in the 1970s, and remember that the American Nazi Party tried to march there. But as it turned out, there was a pathetic turnout of only 100 demonstrators, met by 1,000 counter-protestors. So I’ve spent the rest of my life saying, it’s going to be fine, we’re protected, we’re safe. But when I read Prayer for the French Republic, that’s when I felt true panic for the first time…I’m wondering whether I need to leave.”
Cromer spoke to me not lengthy after it was reported {that a} former American president dined with an infamously outspoken Jew hater and an open neo-Nazi. “There’s something in the air,” Cromer stated. “Everyone can feel it.”
Remember this.
Carol Rocamora (she/her) is an educator, translator, playwright and critic.
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