The Theatre of the Holocaust: Six Plays v. 2 Book

This second volume of The Theatre of the Holocaust, when combined with the first, represents the most significant and comprehensive international collection of plays on the Holocaust. Since the appearance of Volume 1 in 1982, theatre and Holocaust studies have undergone astonishing transformations. In Volume 2, Skloot presents six plays acknowleding the most recent theatrical forms in our post-modern age. H. I. D. (Hess Is Dead), Howard Brenton A dramatic encounter with the ghosts that haunt modern Europe. Camp Comedy, Roy Kift The career of the noted actor Kurt Gerron who was ordered by the Nazis to a film of a concentration camp in order to deceive the Red Cross. Dreams of Anne Frank, Bernard Kops The most famous Holocaust victim uses her extraordinary, artistic imagination to free herself from her attic prison through dreams of surrealistic wonder. The Model Apartment, Donald Margulies A sad journey of an elderly couple retiring to Florida turns into wild comedy. The Survivor and the Translator, Leeny Sack A performance art piece about the playwright's grandmother, a concentration camp survivor. Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., George Steiner (adapted for stage by Christopher Hampton) The controversial political thriller based on the discovery of Adolf Hitler, at age 90, by an Israeli search party in the Brazilian jungle. Since the appearance of Volume I of The Theatre of the Holocaust in 1982, the old discipline of theatre and the new discipline of Holocaust Studies have undergone astonishing transformations. Both the old and the new have changed and been changed by the academic and cultural turbulence that has forced the boundaries defining art and history to be altered, even eliminated. The six plays that are found in Volume II, beyond their intrinsic merits as theatrical texts of extraordinary quality, provide proof of this turbulence and these changes. Foremost among the changes has been the incorporation into the field of Holocaust Studies of new and different voices with new and different points of view concerning this catastrophic historical event. As time's progress has moved all of us further away from the Holocaust, the voices of those who were reluctant to speak earlier, were too young to speak before, or were not yet born, have begun to appear in greater and varied profusion. For example, in the last decades, the public has needed to accommodate itself to the outpouring of memoirs of Holocaust survivors and their children which, by the 1990s, had filled many shelves in book stores in the United States and abroad. And just as these memoirs represent only a small fraction of the stories that could be told about "ordinary" people in times of extraordinary duress, so these survivors' tales have been accompanied by the stories of their oppressors and tormentors, further enlarging the record of Holocaust testimony available to the general reader.Read More