Playwright: Martin Sherman
At: Caught In The Act Productions at the Chopin, 1543 W. Division St.
Phone: (773) 593-2862; $15
Runs through: April 11
Our heroes, Rudy and Max, are enjoying the Berlin Gay Life—the former dances in a transvestite revue, while the latter boozes, snorts coke, invites strangers home for casual sex, tells lies and dodges the rent. But then the SS arrives to round up the Deviants, and these lovable hedonists are dragged off to Dachau, where we should expect only oppression, humiliation, and brutality. Instead, the second act (sometimes presented as a separate play in itself) has Max—who's been forced by sadistic officers to kill Rudy—befriend fellow inmate Horst. As the two execute their assigned task of transporting rocks around the jailyard, they swap encounter-therapy dialogue to forge a relationship which will, of course, prove their undoing. But this is not a Holocaust play, however its setting tries to distract us into thinking so.
Consider that if this were a common prison, we might speculate on the crimes leading to its incarceration therein. But in the dramatic iconography of our time, asylum inmates, political prisoners and concentration-camp detainees are assumed to be innocent of wrongdoing and pure of heart. And uniformed Natsies, unlike figures who must answer to their own superiors, are the quintessence of villainous anarchy. Playwright Martin Sherman relies on these propagandistic techniques to impose a veneer of social significance on a comic-book plot attractive only to hankie-wringing romantics.
Hankie-wringing romantics, that is, or a young theatre company. Under Carrie Johnson's direction, though, this Caught In The Act production reflects no more regard for the logic of its own universe than Sherman for his. For example, we are told that conversation is forbidden between prisoners, but Max and Horst grimace and gesticulate in emotional agony easily discernible by guards whose vigilance is not restricted by the author's agenda. And why do the actors who must carry their heavy cargo for nearly an hour (these are REAL rocks) choose to do it in the manner MOST likely to render them quickly uncomfortable?
Caught In The Act shows evidence of creative talent, but its efforts to rescue this fundamentally flawed script never transcend classroom ambiance to achieve a believable level of horror—or of romance, for that matter.