'Lebensraum' asks tough questions
Israel Horovitz's play Lebensraum, which opened on Holocaust Remembrance Day, asks the difficult question: Can people forgive but not forget? The plot's premise is both provocative and ludicrous. The chancellor of Germany invites six million Jews from anywhere in the world to come to live in Germany as instant citizens. "Project Homecoming" is designed to assuage 60 years of German guilt and shame, and the play follows a variety of people who take up the offer.
Israel Horovitz's play
Lebensraum
, which opened on Holocaust Remembrance Day, asks the difficult question: Can people forgive but not forget?
The plot's premise is both provocative and ludicrous. The chancellor of Germany invites six million Jews from anywhere in the world to come to live in Germany as instant citizens. "Project Homecoming" is designed to assuage 60 years of German guilt and shame, and the play follows a variety of people who take up the offer.
The title, Lebensraum, means "living space" in German, and that becomes the issue - will Jews ever have lebensraum in the world? When 10 million Germans are unemployed, and others are struggling, their resistance to these new celebrity Jews seems inevitable; hard times are never good times for immigrants.
Three good actors play many roles with many accents, simply adding a hat or a scarf to sketch in the next character. The excellent Steve Hatzai carries the heftiest roles, from an American dock worker who moves his family from Gloucester, Mass., to an old, displaced concentration-camp survivor who moves from Australia to his childhood Berlin.
Jodi Epstein shifts from a fierce Israeli military operative ("We are the new Jews") to the lovely, young Anna, daughter of a German dock worker who, predictably, falls in love with Sam, played by Robert DaPonte. When Sam's father takes Anna's father's job, resentment turns to rage, letting us glimpse the complexity of both the practical problems and the emotional turmoil.
Each actor narrates events and introduces the many people representing many positions: neo-Nazis, opportunistic bosses, shocked school children learning about the Holocaust for the first time, angry husbands, helpless wives.
The play is more satisfying theatrically - watching the actors' virtuosity - than it is politically, since the point of Horovitz's play seems elusive. The production might have more punch if it were more vaudevillian - faster and more energetic - rather than being so respectful of its serious subject that it becomes lugubrious.
Lebensraum
Written by Israel Horovitz, directed by Gregory Scott Campbell, sets and lighting by Brandon Phillips, sound by Andrew Monheim.
Presented by Luna Theater Co.
The cast: Robert DaPonte, Steve Hatzai, Jodi Epstein
Playing at: Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 9th and Walnut streets., Through Feb. 25. Tickets: $10-$25. Information: 215-704-0033 or www.LunaTheater.org.
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