toys
by
Douglas Messerli
Hotel
Modern (theater group) Kamp / Los
Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the performance I saw with Deborah Meadows was
opening night, September 20, 2018
The
Rotterdam theater troupe Hotel Modern, who over the past few years have been
touring the US, have produced yet another important document about the
Holocaust, and, even more importantly, tell its story in a way that appears to
a younger audience who may not completely be acquainted with the horrors and
the German, Polish, and other European Nazi death camps. If the audience at
Redcat last night is any indication, they are reaching an audience of teens and
20-year-olds who most need to hear this story.
The three performers, two women and one
male dressed in gray robes, tell the horrific story in this case not through a
barrage of reportage, but silently. Having created what feels like a completely
accurate miniature reaction of Auschwitz, they move trains into the set, unload
hundreds of passengers, move them into detention and into the gas showers, show
them at work, trying to survive on the gruel they were fed, beaten to death,
and even electrocuted on the fences as one tries to escape, all my by
hand-manipulating tiny figures within this landscape while filming them through
a tiny camera that imposes their images in large form upon a wall that covers
the entire back of the proscenium theater.
Somewhat like a silent film, we see
these ghoulish figures, whose bodies are so wasted that they appear—as they
truly are—as stick figures, while their faces are contorted into open holes of
mouth and eyes a bit like Edvard’s Munch’s The
Scream and even more reminiscent of the Expressionist German paintings
before and after the great wars.
Despite the lack of dialogue, however,
sound is extremely important here: a saw against wood, a Nazi billy club
hitting the head and other body parts of a victim, the thin soup being poured
into the prisoner’s bowls, the shovel against the poison that is tossed into
the showers, the drunken songs of the German guards, the train chugging its way
into camp. Only the prisoners cannot be heard, much as in real life for those
of us outside the camps (it’s fascinating that the 2015 film, László Nemes’ Son of Saul gives us a vision of that
same hell with endless voices of the damned).
But these figures, brought in and out in
large interconnected blocks are clearly interchangeable puppets, like the toy soldiers
of a children, are hefted in and out much as the Nazi’s themselves treated
them, as indefinable groups rather than individualized beings. More than
anything else the “puppeteers” themselves reveal how life in the camp was
lived; people were subject the idea of the entire Jewish (gypsy, gay, etc)
communities, unworthy of being perceived as separate from their groups. Hitler
had already established categories of people which this presentation
reiterates. The mechanized behavior of the prisoners is played out in this
drama simply through the larger human beings, who control and set up their
miniature figures, with little concern of the figurines and separate
representations of being.
And in that sense, the regulation of the
set becomes its own statement about the nature of the actual human beings’
lives. Lights are turned on, one by one, throughout the miniature camp, fences
are set up at seemingly illogical places, masses are gathered into different
spots in the prison without logical explanation—but all with a superhuman
regularity, as if these “players” are gods. I have never before seen a better signification
of what it actually means when boys and girls take out toy soldiers and trot
them through their imaginary and often meaningless gatherings.
The wars these children play out are as
arbitrary as all human wars and the sufferings those involved must endure. The
representations of actuality are made to be utterly meaningless in the act of
play itself.
I suppose for those of my generation,
most members of whom well know of the true horrors of the destruction of millions
of Jewish citizens and others, that this retelling of the tale might seem
almost unnecessary or, at the very least, repetitive. We have been there in our
imaginations and in our readings so very many times. But by demonstrating the
complete control the Nazis—who thought of themselves as superhuman gods—had
over their prisoners, or playthings, the Hotel Modern revealed the horrors to a new audience, helping them to realize that the people gassed, shot, and beaten in the
camps were, as this theater troupe makes clear, just that, toys to be played
with, not beings of blood and flesh.
This group has found the perfect way to
entertain younger generations while simultaneously revealing the terror of the
children and child-like adults of every decade of life.
After the performance, the group invited the
audience to come up to their miniature Auschwitz to see it up-close and even
take pictures. My guest, Deborah Meadows, and I instinctively ran off in the
other direction, not so much because we were hurrying back to our homes from
the hour-long performance, but because, I believe, we could not imagine
ourselves as tourists to such a dark past.
Los Angeles, September
21, 2018
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