Playwright: Shimon Wincelberg, from Rachmil Byrks' A Cat in the Ghetto
At: Infamous Commonwealth Theatre at Rave Theatre
Phone: 312-458-9780; $20
Runs through: Sept. 2
In recent months Chicago theaters have staged The Diary of Anne Frank, The Puppetmaster of Lodz and, now, Resort 76. Together with Ghetto, staged not long ago, all are the same play, broadly speaking: stories of the depravity, degradation, brutality, bravery, collusion and struggle for survival of Jewish communities under Nazi occupation. The Polish ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz were a particular study in ruthless cruelty, as the Nazis placed Jewish collaborators over the communities who—in the name of doing the best they could—were as vicious as the Nazis themselves might have been.
Resort 76, with echoes of Gorki's The Lower Depths, is set in bombed-out Lodz, where Jews have been organized into factory units, living in primitive shared quarters euphemistically dubbed resorts. At Resort 76, bloody clothing and rags are processed into yarns from which carpets are woven. From 1939 to 1944 the Lodz ghetto survived this way, its citizens conducting daily business in a distortion of normal society, although subject to brutal police authority, slow starvation and disease. Under such conditions, something as commonplace as a cat could be a valuable commodity to be bartered through the black market for bread, medical attention or escape documents. Such is the situation in Resort 76, when a cat rends the tight-knit survival community.
How do twisted circumstances affect our understanding of right and wrong? What is morally justified? What is righteousness? Even contemplating doing the right thing—let alone accomplishing it—can become a surreal endeavor under the persuasive hardships of war, hunger, famine and social chaos. Infamous Commonwealth Theatre is devoting its 2007-2008 season to exploring righteousness and, certainly, a Holocaust drama puts the issue in stark focus.
But how many plays do we need not only of similar theme, but of nearly-identical circumstances? There's nothing particularly wrong with this production of Resort 76 nor of the play itself, except that it tries to squeeze too many character stories into its two-hour span; but—dare I say it?—I neither want nor need to see another play about The Holocaust ( an historic event in which scores, perhaps hundreds, of my distant relatives perished ) .
However, the production did remind me of the precious fragility of what we call civilization—social stability; orderly government and the rule of law ( more or less ) ; relative freedom; and the contemplation of higher things. Since 1987 we've seen Communist governments fall overnight, sending much of Eastern Europe into bloody chaos, and we've seen the Tiananmen Square protests nearly topple the Peoples Republic while TV daily shows us the global catastrophe of the Middle East. At home, our lie-based national government corrupts the law every day. We may seem far from Lodz and The Holocaust but—God help us, if He exists—we are not.