Playwright: Ron Hirsen. At: Victory Gardens Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets: 1-773-871-3000; www.victorygardens.org; $42. Runs through: Dec. 1
The universe of dramatic literature encompasses a number of plays about survivors of The Holocaust who bury their concentration camp memories beyond recollection, or so they hope. In Ron Hirsen's Elegy, Helmut ( David Wohl ) is one such Jew, a New York pastry maker in the 1970s, originally from Berlin, who survived Auschwitz. In most such plays, the survivor is forced to dredge up horrific memories and confront the issues they represent, from survivor's guilt to loss of faith to despair. Elegy follows suit with a slight twist. The antagonist confronting Helmut is his son, Jerry, an emotionally fragile college student sick of having his parents ( his mother, Hilde, also survived The Holocaust ) describe him as "a miracle" in whom they have invested all their hopes. The twist is that the tool Jerry ( Justin Leider ) uses against his dad is poetry, indeed his father's own poetry written before the war.
At least in part, Elegy seems intended to serve a didactic function. It's an exceedingly spare play, running just 75 minutes, without an extra syllable let alone an unnecessary sentence. It's performed with four actors on a minimal set for easy presentation in a variety of venues such as schools, synagogues, community groups or even churches. The live cellist ( Bill Meyers ) who plays Beethoven between scenes is a lovely flourish, but recorded music also would work.
Generally, it's good for a play to be lean and pared down, but Elegy is scrawny to the point of being schematic, it's characters reduced nearly to stereotypes by the absence of emotional material to flesh them out, despite the use of the poetry as a linguistic and emotional mechanism.
Helmut is emotionally unavailable to his son, or at least undemonstrative, yet Hilde tells us he was a passionate and vibrant young man and artist. But we do not see that passionate young man, even though there are flashbacks to pre-Holocaust 1938 Berlin which reveal how Helmut and Hilde ( Iris Lieberman ) met and courted. We cannot measure Helmut's journey because we do not see him as he used to be. Also, we don't learn quite enough about Jerry to understand what's driven him to suicidal thoughts and a shrink's couch. Finally, while his father's poetry may be a new discovery, surely Jerry has asked his parents many times about their Holocaust experiences and their families. How has Helmut avoided the subject? The play doesn't fill in the logical gaps.
Under director Dennis Zacek, the players are extremely sympathetic; they play good people after all. Admired Chicago veteran Bernard Beck completes the cast as Helmut's father, seen in flashbacks. However, the actors need more words and emotions to make Elegy the profound experience it might be.