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The Gospel According to Moses
Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance edited by Claude Schumacher Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998 355 pp., $80 |
The Holocaust, one of the defining catastrophes in human history, demands our continuous efforts at representation and interpretation. As the event itself becomes more distant, artists have to find new ways of bringing it to life for their contemporaries. (The urgency of this need was apparent at last year's Academy Awards, when the Oscar for Best Director went to Roman Polanski for The Pianist, and Caroline Link's Nowhere in Africa was chosen as Best Foreign-Language Film.) Yet it is not only artists who must rethink the Holocaust for a new generation but critics too, if they are to serve the public well.
For the performing arts, and for critics of the performing arts, the Holocaust poses a particular challenge. Mass extermination calls into question many of the philosophical notions drama and theater have relied on throughout their history: character, identity, and will; agency and choice; justice and redemption; human dignity, morality, and meaning itself. The Holocaust also seems to make a mockery of the most basic elements of drama: hamartia and conflict; complication and suspense; reversal, climax, and denouement. And if even human imagination finds the Holocaust difficult to fathom, isn't the stage—with its material means, such as actors, scenery, props, lighting, and sound—still more likely to distort our grasp of such an experience? Indeed, theatrical performance may be especially prone to doing an injustice to the victims of the Holocaust, by wrapping the Shoah in a two-hour entertainment package, by turning it into trivial spectacle, by exploiting it in order to fascinate the audience. Or might the theater—with its irreducible presence of a community of actors and spectators—hold special opportunities? What can drama and theater, as distinct from the other arts, contribute to our ongoing attempts at understanding the Holocaust?
Such questions have lately been discussed in a number of critical works. Perhaps the widest-ranging of these is Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, edited by Claude Schumacher. Seventeen contributors—academic researchers of drama and theater as well as practitioners of the stage—from Israel, the United States, Germany, and Great Britain offer a rich array of topics and approaches: some sketch larger developments of general historical or aesthetic import, others describe or analyze individual authors or particular works and stagings.
In a succinct introductory chapter, Schumacher circumscribes the arena of his collection, asking what it is that can make the theatrical representation of the Holocaust legitimate, and "how an actor [can] hope to portray either the perpetrator or the victim, without glamorizing or demonizing the former and belittling or sanctifying the latter." In the lead essay, Robert Skloot goes so far as to suggest that today, with the very idea of justice shaken by postmodernism, neither playwrights nor actors nor spectators feel up to the task of judging the Nazi perpetrators. But is this loss of faith in justice and a corresponding disinclination to render judgment—even in the case of the Nazis—as widespread as Skloot supposes?
Freddie Rokem analyzes how Israeli theater since 1980 has explored new ways of diminishing the incommunicability of the Holocaust, not only through first-person testimony and documentary realism, but, more paradoxically, through what Tzvetan Todorov calls "the fantastic": "an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this [. . .] world." During the Holocaust, under the control of incomprehensible forces, Jews must have experienced the world as fantastic. The Israeli performances Rokem discusses—such as Uncle Arthur, Adam's Purim Party, Ghetto, and Arbeit Macht Frei—attempt to relate precisely this experience, in order then to establish that what may seem fantastic did in fact take place. The key to this strategy is the arrangement of a certain relation between stage and audience: through the structure of performance-within-performance, these stagings induce self-reflection, skepticism, and hesitation, leading to the spectator's inability to move forward. But what, we may ask, is achieved by reproducing the historical victim's paralysis in the spectator?
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