Review: Crooked Cross, Sally Carson’s Family Drama About the Rise of the Nazis

Two twentysomethings decorate a Christmas tree in the opening scene of Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross, now playing a revival with Mint Theater Company at Theatre Row. Siblings Helmy (Gavin Michaels) and Lexa Kluger (Ella Stevens) bicker and spread tinsel. As he strains to place the angel on the highest bough, she snuggles with her fiancé, Moritz (Samuel Adams), prompting a sarcastic remark. Their younger brother, Erich (Jakob Winter), soon joins them, along with Mom (Katie Firth) and Dad (Liam Craig), to sing carols around the tree. It’s the picture of an ostensibly happy and growing family, with jagged edges softened in the yuletide glow. It could be any American family this coming December. But it’s not.

Carson was inspired by a holiday in Bavaria to write her 1934 novel, Crooked Cross, which she very quickly adapted into a stage play. It’s a rare theatricalization of the rise of Naziism told without the benefit of hindsight, in which the internal conflicts of an average German family in 1932 eerily resemble those of a typical American family in 2025—particularly the crisis of young men adrift in a time of rapid economic and social change.

“I wish Helmy and Erich had the luck Moritz has had,” Frau Kluger laments, “Erich teaching skiing at the Grand Hotel and out of work the rest of the year, and Helmy drowning his sorrows at the National Socialist Party.”

Moritz is a doctor and a Jew, a fact that he has improbably hidden from his fiancé (everyone in the family seems to know except poor Lexa). He also associates with the Communist Party. Helmy and Erich personally like Moritz, but their growing involvement with the Nazis makes them question their sister’s judgement. Wouldn’t she be better off with a nice Aryan boy like Otto (Jack Mastrianni)? As her biological family goosesteps to the right and her chosen family (that is, Moritz) faces persecution, Lexa struggles to maintain her foothold in the collapsing center.

Director Jonathan Bank has revised Carson’s published script to make it more amenable for modern production, slashing the dramatis personae down from 18 to nine (Ben Millspaugh delivers a respectable performance in the role of “Young Man,” the one holdover from the age of servants and supernumeraries). He has also incorporated some lines from the novel to counteract Carson’s “self-censorship” before a British audience that still hadn’t experienced the Blitz and therefore hadn’t reached a firm consensus on fascism. But he insists, “I haven’t added anything that Carson didn’t write herself.”

That apparently includes a startling acknowledgement of the interplay of sex, money, and power in 1930s Germany, when Lexa calls out the true source of Erich’s seasonal income. The old women who stay at the resort pay him top dollar, just not for his skiing prowess. “I don’t imagine the Storm Troopers are immune to your charms,” she remarks, stabbing and twisting with her words in the way only an older sister can (Stevens more than makes up for her character’s naivety with a performance that conveys intelligence and integrity). This obviously sends her brother into a blind rage. It’s the Depression Era equivalent of having your sister snicker at your OnlyFans page.

“You had a decent chance when you were young,” Helmy screams at his parents, like a recently graduated computer science major who is just now realizing that AI has made all entry-level positions redundant. “It’s we that have had to be young in the rubbish of the last years, since the war.” Both Michaels and Winter deliver fleshy, sympathetic performances of young men who feel trapped in a society that was not designed with their best interests in mind, who see the Nazi Party as their last remaining path to prosperity and purpose.

Of course, this is a road completely closed to Moritz, who takes a principled stand by teaching first aid to a trade union, and is promptly fired from his job at the hospital. Adams maintains a sunny optimism throughout his performance which may seem odd to an audience that knows what happens next. But this production succeeds precisely because no one onstage betrays any foresight, and in doing so, they hold a mirror up to us.

Bank directs a family comedy that slowly but surely transitions into a political and psychological thriller. The production values are high with a handsome rotating set by Alexander Woodward, which Christian DeAngelis lights with dramatic flair. A second-act mountain scene, a collaboration with projection designer Joey Moro, is particularly striking. Sound designer Sean Hagerty cinematically underscores the transitions, helping to maintain the tension that Bank and the actors build over the course of two hours.

Most impressive are Hunter Kaczorowski’s detailed period costumes, which he appears to have procured by driving the DeLorean to the Munich Goodwill circa 1932. Gray wool and cabled sweaters abound. Even the brownshirt uniforms tell a story, with Helmy’s swastika armband just a little too large—a sure sign that he’s not important enough for tailoring and the older storm troopers assume he’ll grow into it. He’s still a boy, after all.

How did we get here? Eight decades after the end of World War II, a time in which the horrors of Naziism were regularly recounted, how have we managed to re-create so many of the circumstances of their rise? How especially have we so failed young men that thousands (perhaps millions) now eagerly await the online broadcasts of a Holocaust-denying white nationalist? Another unearthed gem from Mint Theater, Crooked Cross proves that our present social discontent is nothing new, which is hardly reassuring. But it is a prime example of why this little company plays such a valuable role in the off-Broadway ecosystem.