Auschwitz Alive
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Auschwitz Alive The stage at the Ambassador Theater is entirely a casket of planed, varnished planking with the fourth wall missing. At its center, in a honeycomb of...
...Not everyone in his cast can take over the audience cold at the beginning of a new episode and make it pay heed...
...In the last two lines of the play a witness is asked, "So you survived your stay in the camp...
...the healthier prisoners may be farmed out to Krupp or some other enterprise as slave labor...
...But he has pared and shaped the court records so that they alternate in intensity between the perfunctory and the impassioned, in content between the mass murders and the individual humiliations, in mood between truculence and resignation...
...two witnesses who have appeared on behalf of these accused...
...So it is...
...to concede them any sincerity would be like pardoning them to some extent...
...the ex-guards above them respond with mitigations or counter-accusations of lying...
...a can, with 16 cans used, it cost $8 to destroy 20,000 people...
...We weren't supposed to think for ourselves...
...Families are torn apart...
...It's ugly...
...five witnesses for the prosecution who are former prisoners...
...No man knows who is his ally and who his enemy...
...And when were interesting plays ever beautiful...
...The exprisoners rise and recite their accusations...
...I honestly didn't have anything against those people...
...He answers, "I came out of the camp, yes...
...Gradually the play implants a sense of confusion between the guards and the prisoners who came out alive (and are now witnesses)-an identification that is deepened when one of the guards pleads, "We were nothing but numbers, just like the prisoners...
...During their speeches the arts of director, designer, playwright and actors conspire to make us forget the courtroom trappings and to situate us in the camp...
...These charges gain strength from the slanted, if not malevolent, interviews with the playwright in the New York Times Magazine and other journals...
...Dramatists, even of comedy, hew their writing out of death, bad luck and malign intentions...
...she didn't want to waste her applause on noncelebs...
...He does so, scrupulously...
...As for the criticism that The Investigation is not a play, few people today would care to define what a play is...
...I told my family, 'You keep buying from them.'" We know that torture was referred to as "intensive interrogation conducted according to standard operating procedure," and that exterminated prisoners were said to have been "transferred...
...the Judge and attorneys break in intermittently with factual questions...
...Watching actors in a play we listen attentively to the other side and take its arguments seriously...
...And if The Investigation were no more than a fact sheet-see the play and save reading the full testimony-a potential spectator would be wiser to stay at home with, say, Paolo Levi's If This Be a Man...
...We have been exposed to many statements like the following ones, taken from camp officials: "Why should I have to pay now for what I did then, when everybody else did it too...
...They stand for Auschwitz after the event: two rows of guards and officials from the camp...
...What emerges, then, is a portrait of a non-society, a bestial version of Spencer's survival of the fittest, private competition at its utmost...
...Balance...
...people weren't there for their health...
...It begins by mocking radio soap opera and comes so close to its target that it ends by taking its place...
...In abridging and rearranging the transcript Weiss makes us see that tut-tutting at the monstrosity of the deeds is not enough, that the deeds were the expression of a state of mind, a collection of beliefs that must be understood-not shied away from- because they have persisted...
...The stage has two revolves which juggle with seven handsome settings by David Hays and provide the fastest scene-changes in town...
...As soon as the prisoners enter the camp they are stripped and undergo an inspection, ostensibly as part of a search for hidden valuables, actually as the first stage in breaking them up into single, aggressive units...
...One suspects for a time that Weiss is instructing us again that we are all guilty, which is only another way of saying that we are all innocent: impute the same crime to the whole world and you must exonerate the whole world...
...Yes, Auschwitz was deplorable but we should now concentrate on halting the Vietnam War, fighting poverty, extending civil rights...
...Its existence is its own justification...
...but two performances stand out brilliantly, Peter Brandon's as a youthful guard who grew up under the Nazis, and Graham larvis' as a prosecution witness who slowly reveals the inward scars incurred by imprisonment and the struggle involved in recovering one's status as a human being...
...I happen to think that The Investigation is a painfully rewarding play, but it will undoubtedly drive some spectators out of the house and most of them out of their composure...
...to interpret it he must observe the only reliable rule: Less is more...
...if he is not, they may betray him to the authorities...
...But the camp is still there...
...But when have we heard these words delivered with conviction...
...Nor is Weiss satisfied with condemning the accused men...
...The Judge signals the opening and close of each fragment of testimony by rapping his gavel once...
...We are reasonably accustomed to the chronicle form, reinvigorated by Brecht's epic, which serves as the rough model for Weiss...
...Calm...
...Stasis...
...At stake is the extreme reward or penalty, life or death...
...But not enough of them...
...With The Investigation Ulu Grosbard, the director and co-translator, moves sharply away from the modest banalities of his earlier productions (Beebee Fenstermaker, The Subject Was Roses, A View from the Bridge) and into the ranks of our most ambitious r?©gisseurs...
...The prisoners and officials alike are in this domain, but nobody belongs to it and it belongs to nobody...
...it means working up a new impetus for each scene...
...Accordingly, Kert Lundell's set looks like a natural growth-an enlarged beehive or antheap-floating in the void of time...
...There is a resistance movement among the prisoners but no member of it can be sure whether he is considered dependable by his fellows...
...the information is stale and available elsewhere...
...Only the cunning survived" because "it was normal to live in the face of one's own death," and to fight it off with any means of intimidation and brutality...
...It's not a play...
...Weiss is revelling in blood...
...Below them in the orchestra pit are the Judge and, on either side of him, the defense and prosecuting attorneys...
...The "monologues" and "sketches" are capped with grisly punch lines, some of them statistical documentation- the numbers killed by injection of phenol into their hearts, or the expense of cyanide for the gas chambers (at 50...
...but these commercial transactions are ancillary...
...The material is violently distressing...
...The truth is that Weiss is a much better artist than his publicity about his personal commitments leads us to believe...
...But the information is available elsewhere...
...But toward the end we realize what Weiss has done: brought the camp itself to life as a personality, a vast, remote, dehumanized residue of power, a sponge which mindlessly devours its own tissue...
...there were others around to do the thinking for us...
...It was a penal camp...
...It's old hat...
...During this criss-crossing of evidence the voices only occasionally lift or fail with emotion as they reconstruct the most potent and businesslike death machine in history...
...Since there is no law that compels him to keep his mouth closed to interviewers, and no way to prevent his being misquoted, by omission or otherwise, one must look squarely at his work and discount the private propaganda...
...The camp's only purpose is to continue: a living organism made up of dying, warring cells...
...For the author, Peter Weiss, has continued his practice from Marat/Sade of replacing conventional dramatic development with brief narrations of cruelty that make up a shifting, satanic, gray-andwhite negative of a vaudeville...
...The gold fillings from teeth may be sold...
...I submit that if we sat in on the trials and heard the original testimony we would be so repelled by the defendants and what we learned about them that we would not understand their reality...
...It is a difficult art...
...and Grosbard's staging, for the same reason, keeps each player isolated...
...a lady not far from me on opening night kept asking her husband whether each new entrance represented the appearance of a star...
...The production has 10 big names on the bill...
...One prosecution witness explains that the stronger prisoners stayed close to the weak and the dying in order to snatch bits of food from them or to get possession of the higher, more comfortable bunks...
...Because of its relentlessness, The Investigation itself faces a number of charges...
...At its center, in a honeycomb of sloping, hexagonal places, the director has aligned 20 actors in perfect symmetry...
...Beryl Reid, a marvelously tonic actress, pulls comedy out of everything but the script, a mosaic of those British vernacular gag lines that had perished of overwork well before they passed through the hands of John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney and Bernard Kops...
...At the Alvin, Dinner at Eight is Tyrone Guthrie's follow-up mistake to The Makropoulos Secret nine years ago...
...the ashes of the cremated dead may be purchased by relatives for $3 an urnful...
...A different sort of charge ought to be laid under The Killing of Sister George (Belasco), which offers the laughable, unfunny proposition that Lesbians are ladies who talk like men...
...To start with, the play is indeed ugly...
...The performance certainly has more tonal variety and suspense than the journeys through pathos with which Broadway ordinarily afflicts us and which Weiss and Grosbard strenuously avoid...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 21
