Playwright: Milton Frederick Marcus
At: Pyewacket Productions at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 275-2201; $20-$25
Runs through: July 2
According to a playbill note, author Milton Frederick Marcus wanted to write a Holocaust play with 'some new way of treating it'. His research exhumed two little-known facts: That the nazis had issued a directive mandating that private gardens be planted with Aryan vegetation, and that in 1944, the wife of Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess requested that a gardener be selected from the prisoners in the concentration camps to attend to hers. A microcosmic hanky-wringer along the lines of Driving Miss Daisy might have been fashioned from these skeletal findings. But Marcus set out to write a HOLOCAUST play, by gum, and that's just what he did.
An event with the scope of the Third Reich's mass genocide is not easily shouldered by only two characters—especially two as powerless as these: Else Hess, sequestered with her Wagner records, her politically incorrect paintings and her memories of happier times, and Issac Baum, a former Botany professor brought to restore her ailing landscape to health. Their relationship progresses as might be expected when a lonely housewife and a pedagogical classmaster are thrust into each other's company, but since Marcus is determined to include EVERY symbol suggested by his horticultural metaphor, their personalities are shaped more by heavily ironic pronouncements ( the garden is polluted by too much ASH in the soil—get it? ) than by any credible human experience.
Indeed, so contrived are the confessions on which their growing intimacy is based that we begin to suspect that they are both lying, to one another or to themselves. When the secret behind the gardens' flowery blight is finally revealed, its impact is comprehensible only if we have been listening carefully up to that point. But the play has given us no reason to do so.
That leaves only the Pyewacket company to give us one. Kate Harris and Tim Curtis impose conversational rhythms and subtextual nuances onto the drivel they are forced to utter. David Ferguson's scenery and Joseph Fosco's sound design conjure an exquisite vision of idyllic luxury and lurking menace. And director Linda LeVeque paces her by-the-numbers plot with minuet-precision. But in the end, Marcus' fatuous pomposity renders their most sincere efforts futile.
