Sometime in the 19th century, scholars realized that many of Shakespeare’s plays do not fall into strictly defined categories of comedy or tragedy, and they termed this subgroup of works “problem plays.” For example, there’s some debate over whether the protagonist of
The Merchant of Venice is the titular Bassanio or the Jewish usurer Shylock. If the former is true, the play is a comedy in the sense that Bassanio succeeds in manipulating the Italian courts in order to teach the Jew the merits of Christian charity; but modern audiences tend to view Shylock as the play’s tragic figure, an interpretation that arose when the realistic form of acting that developed in the late 19th century revealed the character to be sympathetic.
The Merchant of Venice is one of the earliest examples of what I refer to as the “Jewish problem play” — i.e., works about the outsider status of Jews in European and Middle Eastern culture presented in morally ambiguous terms. Far more recent examples have been flooding New York stages this season, as detailed below.
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Hannah and Martin
The most influential philosopher of the 20th century was a registered Nazi, and his Jewish lover became the champion of his teachings in the United States. It’s amazing that this true story hasn’t been told before; now, first-time playwright Lisa Fodor has boldly brought it to the stage. The Nazi in question was Martin Heidegger. His mistress, Hannah Arendt, was herself a famous thinker who explored the roots of totalitarianism, yet many say that she served as an apologist for the advocate of fascism who shared her bed.
It would be difficult to think of a more stellar example of a Jewish problem play than Hannah and Martin. The premise of the work blurs questions of morality from the start; the playwright discourages us from judging the relationship in terms of anti-Semitism or self-hatred while forcing us to explore its complications. This Arendt is a shy and nervous student before she meets Heidegger, portrayed here as an almost bumbling beau. When he asks permission to kiss his mistress, we wonder how this man could help lay the philosophical foundation of Nazism.
Unfortunately, Fodor fails to develop the characters much further than this and she sidesteps one of the play’s most fascinating issues. Her Heidegger believes in National Socialism insofar as it will help Germany reclaim its past and he feels that Hitler became “distracted” by “the Jewish question.” While the playwright is right not to explore the characters through the narrow lens of racism, her refusal to acknowledge Heidegger’s ethnic chauvinism as a symptom of his bigotry is itself simplistic. It’s illogical to think that someone who believed in the purity of an ancient German heritage would not harbor any anti-Semitism; the fact that Heidegger had a Jewish mistress who defended him until the end is not convincing counter-evidence, even if that mistress was the otherwise brilliant Hannah Arendt.
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Nossig’s Antics
Although Heidegger’s major works were translated and became deeply influential, the world has lost practically all record of the work of the Zionist artist and philosopher Alfred Nossig. The press release for Nossig’s Antics claims that members of the Jewish underground killed Nossig during World War II because they thought that he had collaborated with the Nazis, but he may have tried to convince SS officials to deal with the “Jewish problem” by deporting Jews to Palestine. (The details of all this are so mysterious that I couldn’t verify the above facts in my own research.)
Hasidic playwright Lazarre Seymour Simckes treads through this murky history in a dark comedic vaudeville that explores the mysteries of Nossig’s life and disappearance. The performance style makes the already baffling history seem even more daunting — but that may be part of the point. Nossig’s Antics asks why history is so important and yet so elusive.
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Golda’s Balcony
A recent headline related to the Mid-East conflict has been the release of Mordechai Vananu from an Israeli prison, where he served an 18-year term for revealing details of his country’s nuclear weapons program. Even today, Israel keeps its nuclear arsenal ambiguous to deter neighboring countries from invading while at the same time avoiding diplomatic pitfalls, but the Vananu incident allowed the world to address the issue openly. William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony almost certainly would not be on Broadway today if not for the widespread acknowledgement of Israel’s nuclear capacity.
That’s because the “balcony” of this play is not similar to that of Broadway’s other female leader, Eva Peron; rather, the title refers to the stockpile of plutonium bombs, located under the Negev desert, that the prime minister authorized as a doomsday defense against surrounding countries. Gibson depicts Meir considering whether she should detonate nuclear weapons over Cairo and Damascus after Egypt and Syria invade Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The playwright challenges the audience to sympathize with the prime minister even as she comes within a hairsbreadth of obliterating two major cities.
Per Gibson, the bombs that Golda orders loaded on the Israeli jets are inscribed with the words “Never Again.” There is bitter irony in the fact that nuclear holocaust is the option considered to prevent another Shoah. At another point, the Hebrew translation of the words “Never Again” is projected onto the back of the stage, and it takes some familiarity with the language to really appreciate the impact of this image: The Hebrew word for “never” is the same as for “thou shalt not,” and so these words appear to be a commandment when juxtaposed against the stone wall.
It’s surprising that Middle East expert Warren Bass found this portrayal to be “too-golden,” according to an article that he wrote for The New York Times. He illustrates the concept with an amusing stereotype: “Not only is this very much your grandmother’s Golda Meir, it is Golda Meir as your grandmother.” While Gibson’s Golda does exhibit flashes of Jewish humor, Bass’s description of a woman who keeps her finger on the button and has a series of affairs with powerful men is inaccurate. Tovah Feldshuh plays the title role with an uncompromising lack of sentiment; if this Golda is a maternal figure, she is an Earth Mother with the potential to destroy as well as create.
Warren Bass is an accomplished historian who traced the US-Israeli alliance to Cold War politics in his controversial book Support Any Friend. In many ways, Golda’s Balcony confirms this connection by placing the countries as political pawns in a larger struggles. In a wry comment on the invasion by Egypt and Syria, Golda says, “Our neighbors are visiting us with Soviet tanks.” At first, Henry Kissinger avoids sending arms to Israel for fear of antagonizing the Arab countries, but Meir’s nuclear trump card eventually forces the U.S. to get involved in order to prevent a much greater disaster.
Perhaps because of my cynicism about the current state of new plays on Broadway, I had expected Golda’s Balcony to be predictable and unchallenging. Instead, it proved especially provocative and timely during the week that I saw it, and it probably was just as pertinent before the release of Vananu. Although the play is clearly Zionist, the nuclear arms issue that it explores would have been verboten in the Israel of the 1970s — and, of course, it will remain controversial.
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Sixteen Wounded
Before it opened, Eliam Kraiem’s Sixteen Wounded sounded like it was going to be a Palestinian answer to Golda’s Balcony as written by a Jew. Most New York critics avoided the political controversy altogether and attacked the play’s underdeveloped characters and contrived plot. Disengaging from the work’s politics creates an illusion of objectivity in that aesthetic values seem to be nonpartisan, but let’s admit that nobody is neutral about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that purely aesthetic criticism has little value in regard to political theater.
That said, Sixteen Wounded did not close because of its radical attempt to humanize a suicide bomber; it failed because Kraiem’s contrived writing clouded his political sentiments. The play begins with Mahmoud, a Palestinian pre-med student, crashing through the window of a bakery owned and run by a fellow named Hans. When the former discovers that the latter is a Jew, he spits on the mezuzah that hangs on his door. Mahmoud later apologizes and the old man offers him a job. Hans teaches Mahmoud life lessons while they bake bread and the young radical soon finds love with Nora, a Dutch girl who works in the bakery.
Such plot twists prompted more than one critic to compare Sixteen Wounded to a sitcom, but the play is anything but middle of the road. At one point, Mahmoud compares the Israeli occupation of Palestine to the Holocaust. Hans, a survivor of the death camps, dismisses that inflammatory statement but adds, “I don’t care what the Jews did to the Arabs, what the Serbs did to the Croats, or what the English did to the Irish.” Hans says he believes that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing even though he isn’t prepared to compare it to the genocide that his family suffered. No one could claim that this statement represents the mainstream of thought on the subject.
Theater is and should be a venue for unpopular viewpoints, but Sixteen Wounded is not as honest about its stance as is Golda’s Balcony. Whether or not you agree with the opinions expressed by Gibson’s Golda, the character is true to the life and spirit of the historical figure. In contrast, the behavior of the characters in Kraiem’s play does not resemble that of real human beings. For example, after Nora and Hans find out that Mahmoud is a marked man for blowing up an Israeli bus, they both decide to give him another chance even though he expresses no regret for his actions; Hans even lets him off the hook when he finds a bomb in the bakery. After throwing his mezuzah in the trash to salvage their friendship, Hans goads Mahmoud to stab him as a way of making the younger man understand that the Jews he kills are not faceless.
The unrealized potential of this play peeks through when Mahmoud removes the mezuzah from the trash and places it back on the door. In the Jewish tradition, the mezuzah signifies the lamb’s blood that the Israelites smeared outside their houses so that the angel of death would pass over them while slaying the first born children of the Egyptians. Playwright Kraiem, the son of a rabbi, could not have missed the significance of the symbol; indeed, he presents Mahmoud as an angel of death who marks his friend’s house for safety before he goes off to blow up a synagogue in a suicide bombing.
Mahmoud tries to justify his murderous act by deploying a symbol of his friend’s religion rather than his own. The light that shines on the mezuzah at the end of the play is doubly haunting because every mezuzah contains the holy Jewish prayer of the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is your God. The Lord is one.” This prayer affirms the monotheism that is central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; by the end of the play, it has come to symbolize a divisive and bloody conflict.
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Aunt Dan and Lemon
Like Eliam Kraiem, Wallace Shawn knows how to write a provocative opening scene. The central character of Aunt Dan and Lemon starts things off by telling the audience that she understands the Nazis’ drive to create the type of society they wanted. After all, isn’t that what every country does?
The body of the play, told in flashback, is meant to reveal how this nice English girl name Lemon adopted such views from her Aunt Dan, a power-obsessed American who lusts after Henry Kissinger and has an affair with a covert assassin. Aunt Dan’s love for Kissinger may be responsible for instilling in Lemon the roots of fascism, but the play gives us only a muddled reference to the bombing of Cambodia and a watered-down cliché about how one must sometimes choose between two evils. Shawn might have explained more fully how Aunt Dan’s sordid anecdotes contributed to Lemon’s transformation.
For all of its flaws, Sixteen Wounded addresses a serious issue earnestly. Although the characters created by the veteran playwright Shawn for Aunt Dan and Lemon are much better realized, some of the play’s lines seem glib when compared to those written by newcomer Eliam Kraiem.
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Nationalism, Identity, and Jewish Problem Plays
Nationalist movements tend to scapegoat Jews as rootless cosmopolitans; that’s why one of the most infamous anti-Semitic hate tracts is titled The International Jew. In America, Joseph McCarthy’s fear of Jewish communists helped to propel the Red Scare, and ultra-nationalist Pat Buchanan carries that torch today with conspiracy theories regarding Jewish neoconservatives and the war in Iraq.
Romania faced the threat of German occupation during his lifetime, and The Journals of Mihail Sebastian shows how the nationalism of Sebastian’s country turned into vicious racism. The play dramatizes the private writings of the Jewish playwright, who lived in Bucharest during World War II; the journals upon which it is based proved Romania’s long-denied complicity in anti-Jewish pogroms when they were published in the 1990s. In one scene, Mihail has been confined to his house for months when the German orchestra visits. He wants to stay home in protest, but the concert is one of the few pleasures that he has left. (This episode begs the question, “How can an artist take pride in a culture that regards him as a dangerous outsider?”)
In Sixteen Wounded, Hans feels little connection to Judaism or Israel. Many Jewish Americans who criticize Israeli policies unfortunately are stigmatized by the religious community as somehow being less Jewish. Along similar lines, Victoria Linchon’s Rite of Return at Theater for the New City concerns a girl named Amanda who is adopted by a Jewish family. When she visits Israel, she befriends a Palestinian named Najwa, whose sense of home and history sets Amanda on her own journey to discover her lost heritage.
According to Tim Robbins’s Embedded, George W. Bush had nothing to do with the second Iraq War; instead, a “cabal” of neo-conservatives hawks used old Mesopotamia to prove the theories of classical scholar and Nazi refugee Leo Strauss. The center-left political magazine The New Republic scoped out a Buchananite conspiracy theory in the play and editor Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote an article dedicated to exposing the masked characters in it. (Kaplan referred to the play as “The Passion of Bull Durham.”) Embedded is not a Jewish problem play according to my definition, but Kaplan’s arguments leave room for a very interesting discussion. You can access his article by clicking here.
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NYU journalism professor Ellen Willis wrote that “Jews have been overrepresented in the ranks of the privileged as well as among the political and social rebels. As a result, Jews are a free-floating political target, equally available to the right or the left, sometimes both at once.” In polarized times, this quotation explains the surge of Jewish themed plays on the cultural landscape, and many of these can be considered “problem plays” in that they explore extremely complicated issues. More examples will almost certainly come along in upcoming seasons.
