NEVER SAY “NEVER AGAIN”
Survivor guilt is supposedly small-scale suffering, compared to the agonies of those who never get the luxury of remorse. It’s a tricky feat to accommodate near evil. Now in a searing Midwest premiere by ARLA Productions at Chicago’s Stage 773, Alan Lester Brooks’s post-war drama A Splintered Soul examines an open-ended aftermath. Long after the death camps close, cruelty continues. Keira Fromm’s accusatory staging of this Holocaust play, powerfully rendered by eight earnest players, delivers achingly unfamiliar indictments.
Brooks’s locale is San Francisco 1947, the seminal settings alternating comfortable, book-lined, tchotchke-rich parlors (comforting interiors, thanks to set designer Brian Sidney Bembridge). Here Rabbi Simon Kroeller (wonderful Craig Spidle), a former resistance fighter, gathers a support group of four young survivors of the Nazi nightmare ’” Polish Jews who are both illegal immigrants and established citizens. Their “Socratic” meetings trigger a wide range of reactions to the now thinkable genocide that they didn’t really leave behind ’” essentially the four “Rs”: resignation, rage, reconciliation, renewal.
However much they’ve been welcomed by the community and congregation, for them the failure of American Jews to realize and oppose the “final solution” remains not just a lost opportunity but an open wound. But, of course, as with Sophie’s Choice, to survive some of the non-slaughtered became “kapos,” traitor angels of death for untold martyrs.
Haunted by the memory (and guided by the “voice”) of his lost Sarah, Simon is the title’s “splintered soul.” Luckily, he finds wisdom and encouragement from an American judge and friend (Dev Kennedy, mediating wherever possible) and an altruistic countess (Johanna McKenzie Miller). Though the judge lost his family, it’s much harder when you saw their end, as the rabbi’s lost and found souls did, individually and collectively. Sadly, despite what these orphans of the storm endured, a Cold War is in full frenzy and some locals at the JCC, who prove their patriotism by scorning their brethren, suspect them as Communist spies or war profiteers sent from Krakow. Is Simon, a self-proclaimed savior of survivors, really providing custody for criminals? Will these 120 minutes confirm the snide and cynical cliché that “no good deed goes unpunished”?
Simon’s displaced persons include Auschwitz escapee Gerta (Eliza Stoughton), now a maid adopted by her California protectors. Mourning the loss of her child, she relishes a second chance in a new world, but she also stirs up the love lives of her sponsors ’” to the rabbi, proof that she’s reengaged with life. Working in a bakery and slated to be married, Mordechi (Nik Kourtis) struggles to forget what he did to live this long. (Oddly enough, it’s an act of love.) Angry with unfinished business, irreligious Sol (Matt Mueller) seethes with unprocessed fury at the cheap American fantasy that this “new normal” can wipe out old pain. (A tool of the terror, Sol was forced to make iron doors, presumably for the ovens.)
A crisis erupts with the arrival of siblings Elisa and Harold (Jessica Kingsdale and Curtis Edward Jackson), a young Polish couple of illegal immigrants who report abuse from the former count who gave them shelter. Have the crimes of the Old World followed them, a constant curse or a reason for revenge?
There’s no avoiding non-rhetorical questions because Brooks’s plot refuses to go gently toward any convenient resolution. (No spoilers here.) The playwright wisely shows how, casting a sinister shadow, the Third Reich’s precedent for violating innocence lacks any expiration date or statute of limitations. Like Pandora’s box, it’s given perverse permission to the future to be ugly. Thousands of miles distant from the scene of cumulative crimes, the rabbi finds no certainty ’” or any end to his personal resistance movement.
A Splintered Soul, like other honest Shoah remembrances, doesn’t dare to deliver a valedictory for so much horror. If anything, as the stories from Syria show, it exposes a new mutation of a latent cancer.
photos by Emily Schwartz
A Splintered Soul
ARLA Productions
Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave
Thurs & Fri at 7:30; Sat at 3 & 8; Sun at 3
ends on May 29, 2016
for tickets, call 773.327.5252 or visit Stage 773
for more show info, visit Theatre in Chicago
