Ghetto
In September 1943 Bruno Kittel, the 21-year-old Nazi officer in charge of Vilna (now Vilnius), sat playing the piano as the Lithuanian Jewish ghetto there was being liquidated. When a young boy threw himself at Kittel’s feet and pleaded for his life, Kittel reportedly shot him with one hand and kept playing with the other.
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This disquieting honesty has been the hallmark of Sobol’s work for more than 20 years: he’s made a career out of humanizing his enemies and demythologizing his heroes. His first major play, The Night of the Twentieth, written in 1976, dramatizes a long night in 1920 before a group of young Zionist settlers take over a strip of land in Palestine. Such pioneers are often depicted as heroic, selfless, and morally pure–much like their American counterparts in the early 19th century–but Sobol’s settlers are run-of-the-mill middle-class Austrian Jews, full of self-doubt and ideological confusion. In 1982 he wrote The Last Night of Otto Weininger, a brutal, surreal biography of the turn-of-the-century Jewish philosopher who longed for an Aryan world, arguing that weakness, destructiveness, duplicity, and ugliness were inherently Jewish.
But despite the warring styles, Sobol’s view of human nature remains in perfect focus. The play begins with Kittel in the Vilna theater ordering a crowd of unemployed actors to sort through an enormous pile of clothes, presumably belonging to those killed at the concentration camp in nearby Ponar. Kittel’s subtle cruelty is horrifying, but in the same scene he also orders that a barefoot, nearly naked woman be given shoes and a dress, coat, and hat.
With the exception of Gens and Weiskopf, the Jews are a pitiable mob in the first act, always acted upon but rarely acting. For a time it seems that being a Jew in Vilna entails walking slowly, stooping slightly, and cringing–unless you’re singing in a big production number, when you must suddenly adopt a pose of stern defiance. MacLean does an excellent job of re-creating the terrorizing influence the Nazis had over the Jews, but once he’s established this power imbalance he simply reiterates it in scene after scene. Rather than the galloping confusion Sobol envisions for his first act, MacLean gives us a series of museum displays. The actors end up not as characters but as icons of noble Jewish misery or sterile Nazi fiendishness. In either case, they’re rarely recognizably human.
