Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity Erika Hughes Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. By Gene A. Plunka. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; pp. vi + 447. $99.00 cloth. Gene Plunka’s Holocaust Drama offers a broad introduction to the genre from which it takes its title. As such, the book covers much ground, dealing with over thirty plays from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Fortunately, Plunka does not race through his material, but, rather, describes each play thoroughly. He buttresses his analysis with performance histories, background information about the playwrights, and critical commentary by scholars of Holocaust theatre and literature, notably Alvin Rosenfeld, Lawrence Langer, Robert Skloot, Christopher Bigsby, and Terrence Des Pres. In this sense, his contribution offers a useful introduction to Holocaust performance and its scholarship. Like most studies of dramatic interpretations of the Holocaust, the book is organized thematically. The fourteen chapters cover a range of topics, which include “Transcending the Holocaust,” “The Holocaust as Literature of the Body,” “Marxism and the Holocaust,” “Survivor Syndrome and the Effects of the Holocaust on Families,” and “The Holocaust and Collective Memory.” The chapters read as standalone essays which avoid jargon and, for the most part, are clearly written. The Holocaust is not a universally understood historical event, and the book’s target audience (readers [End Page 311] in the US and UK) will have certain frames of reference that do not correspond with how the Holocaust is understood in other countries, particularly Germany and Israel. The author acknowledges these cultural differences in his discussion of the plays, yet his analysis frequently focuses on historical and theatrical similarities instead of differences in the ways that the Holocaust experience is remembered worldwide. His examination of Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel and Ben-Zion Tomer’s Children of the Shadows presents struggles of postwar immigration and assimilation common in both the United States and Israel. Likewise, in “Historical and Moral Responsibility in the Ghettoes,” Plunka draws parallels between playwrights from Israel and the United States who were indirectly affected by the Holocaust and who instead experienced it through stories of relatives and neighbors, Holocaust literature, and formal interviews with survivors. In his introduction, Plunka notes the large number of plays about the Holocaust: one of his sources records “257 Holocaust plays written through to 1997” (18). He therefore limits his analysis to “those plays written about Nazi genocide conducted between 1933 and 1945,” and of these, “the most salient plays of the last half of the twentieth century” (18). The American plays discussed include many well-known works, such as Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank, Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, and Martin Sherman’s Bent. Similarly, German examples include such oft-discussed plays as The Investigation by Peter Weiss, Nelly Sachs’s Eli, and Erwin Sylvanus’s Dr. Korczak and the Children. Plunka also deals with a number of French plays, such as Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? and two that were new to this reviewer, Michel Vinaver’s Overboard and Gilles Ségal’s All the Tricks but One. Holocaust Drama also includes notable Israeli plays such as Motti Lerner’s Kastner and two of the three plays in Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto Triptych, Adam and Ghetto, among others. For those not familiar with Michael Taub’s anthology Israeli Holocaust Drama, this book will serve as an important introduction to this aspect of Israeli theatre, which asks its audience some of the most difficult questions regarding the Holocaust—questions about responsibility and individual choices—of any of the theatrical cultures discussed herein. Plunka rightly notes that, in Sobol and Tomer, the Israeli theatre has a tradition of innovation with respect to form (269). He also succeeds in describing the complicated ways in which German and Israeli audiences have received the stagings of their difficult Holocaust legacies, charting the controversies surrounding productions like Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy and Sobol’s Ghetto. Absent from Plunka’s study are unpublished works, performance pieces, and dramas deemed “minor” (18), as well as plays written for young...