M.C. GARDNER
Early in the fall of 2003, I traveled across a continent and an ocean to arrive at the Mercury Theatre, near the east coast of England , in the ancient municipality of Colchester . The occasion of the journey was a production of Donald Freed’s The White Crow (Eichmann in Jerusalem ).
I had previously written an introduction to a collection of Freed’s plays published by the Broadway Press. The piece was called, after one of his plays, “How Shall We Be Saved?” The collection also contained my musing on the text of The White Crow. Anyone familiar with Freed’s oeuvre will understand its growing relevance to our current wars and demonologies. It was with an enthusiasm bordering on dread that I awaited the apocalyptic animation of Freed’s words upon the stage of the Mercury.
“White Crows” were Germans opposed to Germany ’s holocaustic descent and the race laws that preceded it. The psychologist Miriam Baum is fictional composite of intellectuals and moralists deciding the fate of Adolph Eichmann.
The death penalty in Israel is reserved only for Nazi war criminals. Eichmann was kidnapped in South America by Israeli intelligence operatives, shortly before his trial in 1960. The question the play poses holds as true for the captors as it does their captive. Dr. Baum seeks to salvage some semblance of humanity from the prisoner, Adolph Karl Eichmann. Can she persuade him to imagine the horrors of which he was complicit and call them to a halt? Can Dr. Baum conjure humanity from a monster? In a chilling scene, late in the second act, Dr. Baum calls upon Eichmann to stop the trains traveling to the death camps – to stop the gas flooding the death chambers. He can do neither.
The Israelis are called upon, as well, to stop the execution of a Nazi; to stop Eichmann’s inexorable march to the gallows. Both parties fail. One is not surprised at Adolph Karl’s limitations. When one resides at the bottom of humanity, one’s fall is but a step. The greater tragedy is for Dr. Baum and the Israelis. When captives become executioners a moral universe is traversed. The graveyards of Israel and Palestine are the current testament of that merciless exactitude.
Following the pattern of Aeschylus, the play is fashioned for two characters. A guard, played by Nick Waters, remains a silent witness for portions of each of the two acts. Dr. Baum is played by the lovely Holly de Jong and Eichmann by the remarkable Gerald Murphy.
On opening night the play was somewhat overwhelmed by the power of Mr. Murphy’s performance. Mr. Murphy reminded one of the tortured Quasimodo of Charles Laughton. His virtuosity brought the first act to such a distressing conclusion that the dynamics of the second act had, perhaps, too great a distance to traverse. Ms. de Jong rose admirably to the challenge but one felt this was a production still finding its legs and warranting another viewing.
I had that opportunity on Monday the 6th of October. Here Mr. Murphy’s performance took on the greater subtlety of an Emil Jannings and Ms. de Jong’s performance had risen in stature to the blue angel of a Marlene Dietrich. The first act was more slowly paced and allowed its audience a surer grasp of Freed’s themes.
The second act ratcheted up the drama with a pace that never faltered. Both actors allowed their performances the full expanse of their art and the result was devastating in impact. A fire set in a trash pail smoldered unrelentingly toward the close of the second act. The auditorium filled with smoke. The actors and the audience engaged the scenes as if from the lowest rungs of Dante’s abattoir. Each was implicated in a damnation visited upon all.
The production was consummately directed by Michael Vale. The lighting was designed by Emma Ralphs. The stage manager was Claire Casburn and the Technical Stage Management was overseen by Howard Smith. Special mention should also be made of the executive vice-president of Mercury Theatre, Dee Evans, who courageously marshaled the production to the stage. Ms. Evans is a visionary who is arranging lectures involving theatre at the Mercury and a circuit of plays concerning human rights. Plays by Pinter and Freed are planned. The White Crow was a remarkable initial foray into the theatre of thought and political meditation.
Once the production caught its stride it was an overwhelming marriage of performance and word. The richness of Freed’s text had come to startling life on the Mercury stage. The actors and their audience had become the “abstract and brief chronicles of time.” The ovations at curtain’s fall were proof of a brevity easily worth the distance each had traversed. Freed’s tragedy haunts the memory of the 20th century and attends the 21st in any political judgment too cavalierly convinced of the certainty of its own righteousness.