the same but different
by Douglas Messerli
Janet
Schlapkohl My Sister / Los Angeles,
Odyssey Theatre / the performance I attended was the matinee on March 6, 2016
First
presented in a shorter version at the LA Fringe Festival, Janet Schlapkohl’s play
My Sister played January through
March of this year, with its production recently extended, at Los Angeles’
Odyssey Theatre.
Schlapkohl’s play is set in the Berlin of the 1930s, so one can be assured that it is a story involving Nazi Germany. However, in this case the central (and only on-stage) characters are not Jewish nor have they been intentionally undermining Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist government. Indeed these two provincial twins, Magda and Matilde—wonderfully performed by two real-life twins, Elizabeth and Emily Hinkler—have come to the capitol to free themselves from country restrictions, hoping to perform (in Magda’s case) and to write (in Matilde’s instance). Indeed Magda, the less intellectually endowed of the two, seems quite comfortable at moments with the rising anti-Jewish sentiments and the introduction of Hitlerian Eugenics at the hospital where she works during the days as a cleaning woman.
As the days pass, however, Hitler’s
government increasingly creates new rules that begin to close down the cabarets
and make performing any kind of humor more and more difficult. Matilde, who,
unlike her sister, can speak English and who listens all day long as she sits
in their apartment to her beloved radio, begins to realize the increasing
dangers, and tries to instill what she perceives into her sister’s thinking.
Magda, however, does perceive the dangers if she were actually to repeat all
the jibes and jokes that Matilde has written for her to perform, and waters-down
some of her material.
And even Magda gradually begins to
perceive the difficulties of surviving, particularly after she discovers that
the vans presumably taking some of the disabled patients to better facilities
are actually transporting them to their deaths. The sudden disappearance of one
of her favorite child patients devastates her as she is forced to “pay
attention”—a problem she has evidently had all through her childhood education—recognizing
that her beloved sister is now in danger, particularly since the apartment manager,
who knows of her condition, has himself become a Nationalist Socialist
supporter.
Presumably, it is the loss of that
connection with the world that forces the disabled girl to attempt to follow
her sister to the theater.
While Magda begins to present the skit,
to an audience now filled with Nazi soldiers, she shifts entirely away from her
original satire, singing, instead, a German folk song in which the soldiers
join in singing.
At that very moment, so we are told by
Magda in a postlude, Matilde has taken a fall down the stairs without actually
hurting herself; nonetheless she is taken to the hospital and ferried way
either for experimentation or extermination before Magda can even reach the
hospital.
Los Angeles,
March 7, 2016
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