The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #95037   Message #1911313
Posted By: Azizi
16-Dec-06 - 05:41 PM
Thread Name: BS: Growing up in post-holocaust Germany
Subject: RE: BS: Growing up in post-holocaust Germany
Here's an excerpt of an article about a play about post-holocaust Germany and Jewish people:

Israel Horovitz's Elbow Room
The award-winning playwright revives 1996 play and launches a new theater company.
Ted Merwin - Special To The Jewish Week (12/15/2006)

"Could Germany possibly do anything to redress the genocide perpetrated on the Jews during the Holocaust? In Israel Horovitz's award-winning 1996 play, "Lebensraum," now being revived in New York, the German chancellor makes a sudden, stunning announcement: Six million Jews from all over the world are invited to resettle in Germany.

The resulting violent controversy proves that German guilt is not so easily alleviated, nor can Jews easily resume their role in German society. Just three actors — T. Ryder Smith, Suli Holum and Ryan Young — perform all 80 characters in the piece, which include an unemployed dock worker from Massachusetts, a German minister and a couple of Israeli undercover agents who consider themselves to be the "policemen of the world's Jews." Anita Gates of the New York Times called the play "powerful and touching" when it first ran in New York.

"Lebensraum" directed by Jonathan Rest, is a kind of counter-factual play, on the lines of Philip Roth's novel "The Plot Against America." The comic drama takes its name from Hitler's insistence that the Germans needed "elbow room," and thus were entitled to expand the German homeland into Russia and other countries. Rest, who worked as a physician in Berkeley before deciding to make a career for himself in the theater, told The Jewish Week that the play "juxtaposes hilarious and horrific images," in order to get audiences thinking about the insidious virus of anti-Semitism...

Interviewed by telephone, Horovitz said that the idea for "Lebensraum" came during a trip to Germany, a country that he had long resisted visiting. When a Bonn production of his play "Park Your Car in Harvard Yard" cut a line in which a character talks about being a Yankee Jew, he asked the leading actress why. "It doesn't smell good to have Jews on stage in Germany," she told him matter-of-factly. Horovitz immediately decided that he needed to write about attitudes toward Jews in post-Holocaust Germany..."

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13405