The Obligation
Roger Grunwald
The Mitzvah Project in association with Playground
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| Roger Grunwald |
The April 12, 2018, edition of The New York Times printed the following findings from a survey
released a few days earlier on Holocaust Remembrance:
- 31% of Americans and 41% of Millennials
believe that two million or less Jews were killed in the Holocaust (not the
actual six million or more).
- 41% of Americans and 66% of Millennials
cannot say what Auschwitz was.
- And an astounding 52% of
Americans think Hitler came to power by force (versus by vote of the electorate)!
Roger Grunwald, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, is
dedicating much of his creative talents and his time to ensure the collective
memory of what happened does not continue to fade until hardly anyone in future
generations remembers “a world gone mad.”
Taking a story he first told in a short play, The Mitzvah, and turning it into a
fuller, one-man show in which he stars, Mr. Grunwald returns to the Potrero
Stage in order for the Mitzvah Project in association with Playground once
again to stage the 2017, much-lauded, world premiere, The Obligation. A story of
the Holocaust told primarily through three disparate characters he masterfully
interchanges, The Obligation is Roger
Grunwald’s wake-up call to us, his audience, to be on constant outlook for
ingrained, insidious prejudice that can emerge any time – and in fact is
showing its ugly head even now.
Continuously smashing the boundaries of time, space, and
persona during the one-hour, twenty-minute performance, Mr. Grunwald skips back
and forth between 1936 and the present and many points in between. With him, we travel from Bialystok, Poland to
Auschwitz, to New York and back again. And
with hardly a pause for breath, he switches between the heavily accented voice
of a Polish Jew named Schmuel Berkowicz to the vile gruffness of a half-Jewish
lieutenant in the German army named Christoph Rosenberg to the wry, witty
comments of an unnamed comedian looking, acting, and sounding much like Groucho
Marx. And along the way, sometimes he is
just Roger Grunwald, looking directly to us in the audience, and urging us with
eyes unwavering in their intensity, “We have to stop making a demon, a devil,
out of the other.”
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| Roger Grunwald |
After reenacting Schmuel’s emotional first glimpse of Lady
Liberty once finally arriving in the U.S. after his harrowing, hellish
experiences at the hands of Nazi Germany, Roger Grunwald becomes the
eleven-and-a-half-old Schmuel (rolling up his rough, woolen pants to become a
boy’s knickers) in his mid-1930s hometown of Bialystok. In a pre-pubescent, squeaky voice that is
often full of youthful wonder and curiosity, he describes in meticulous details
some of the sights and sounds of the Germans as they arrived in increasing
numbers on the streets of his neighborhood.
The boy’s voice turns to nervous worry and stunned horror as he tells us
of the day one thousand men and boys were locked up in the Great Synagogue
(only to be burned alive) or of the day his father and brother disappeared,
never to be seen again.
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| Roger Grunwald |
As his story takes us into the Bialystok where the 50,000 Jews
of the city were confined – only 250 of which survived the war --, Mr. Grunwald
removes his sweater and persona of the now-adult Schmuel to become a
German-uniformed officer. As he swears
and grits his teeth in disgust, Odilo Globocnik describes how and why
Poland “had to be cleansed” of Jews in order to make way for the hard-working
farmers and factory workers of Germany who needed more land. As he talks matter-of-factly to us in a ‘just
between you and me’ manner about being “the Nazi you never heard of” who “made
a career out of being anti-Semitic,” he erotically strokes the Nazi symbol on
his coat. He also snidely reminds us
that it is America’s laws about how whites treated blacks that helped inspire Germany’s
“cleansing operation.”
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| Roger Grunwald |
The recreated scenes that Mr. Grunwald so masterfully,
chillingly delivers of the stark, still-shocking-each-time-heard-again
realities of those times are often enhanced by the vicious sounds of barking
dogs, marching boots, and angry orders to screaming victims – all part of the
sound design of Theodore J.H. Hulsker who also provides snapshot videos to
remind us of the times before, during, and after the horrors. Brittany Mellerson’s lighting gives a shadowy
effect of emerging memories while the set design of Director Nancy Carlin
allows the costumes of Brooke Jennings and the locations/moods of the story to
be switched seamlessly even as Mr. Grunwald hardly pauses to catch a breath in
the frequent transformations.
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| Roger Grunwald |
There are times when the many changes in time, place, and
person become a bit confusing; and some of the sideline, almost-lectures border
on being pedantic while still being overall powerful in message. Frequently, Mr. Grunwald leans to the right,
raises a cigar in hand, and makes a Groucho-like remark as a kind of sarcastic
commentary on the story at hand. The net
effect is interesting, allows some comic relief, but also is somewhat
distracting.
One of the most impactful messages Roger Grunwald delivers
is in the description of Schmuel’s friend, Duhvid, who was with him in the
concentration camps. The story of how --
twenty years after arriving in New York to become a successful furrier –
“Auschwitz hung on to him and never let him go” is heart-breaking and a firm
reminder why our memories must never let go of what happened to the six million
as well as to all those who amazingly survived beyond the war.
In a letter his father wrote for his own memorial, Schmuel’s
son, Peter, reads, “For years I lived in Death’s House; I know him.” In The
Obligation, Roger Grunwald brings us face-to-face with both the victim and
the perpetrator, of the inhabitant and of the architect of that Death
House. We leave Potrero Stage hopefully
recommitting to “never stop, never stop” our own obligation to remember and to
tell others of them both.
Rating: 4.5 E
The Obligation
continues through November 4, 2018 by The Mitzvah Project and in association
with Playground at Potrero Stage, 1695 18th Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at http://playground-sf.org/ or at http://potrerostage.org.
Photo Credits: Leo Correa
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