Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

A few years back, the New York Times ran a piece on a librarian in a small Southern town who found herself locked in a political battle with the town’s mayor. He didn’t approve of her programming and taste in books, and he didn’t see why she should be paid a salary of any consequence. I contacted the librarian in question and asked if I could buy a few books for her collection that the town’s cutback budget had kept her from acquiring. I asked her how the Times article had been received, and she said that the mayor had told her that if she wanted to live somewhere else, he would be happy to help her pack. Ultimately, she wearied of fighting him and the people behind him (much of the community). She and her husband did indeed move, and I was unable to find out to where. Her emails bounced back to me.

For those of us who grew up thinking of libraries as sanctuaries, it’s a shock to find that they have turned into battlefields in culture wars that frequently turn vicious. As yet, I haven’t heard of anybody being arrested because of what they have checked out, but I have heard of people being fired for the books they’ve put on shelves. So the library has become a dangerous place.

Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library (currently playing in one of the 59e59 theaters) reminds us that there have been other times when libraries have been dangerous places. A young Jewish woman named Mrs. Stern is arrested for suspicions about her behavior in one. The time is 1933, the library is in Berlin, and the Nazi authorities suspect Mrs. Stern is using the library’s resources to research information that, if shared with the outside world, will reveal truths about Germany they would prefer not be known. A political police officer named Karl Frick arrests her and the dialogue that makes up the bulk of the play by Jenny Lyn Bader begins.

We gradually realize that the young Mrs. Stern (whose husband has disappeared) will one day be known to the world as Hannah Arendt and draw on her early years in Germany when she writes a book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in the course of which she will coin the chilling phrase “the banality of evil.” That realization relieves us; we know she will get out of the prison cell where she is held. The central question of the play then becomes how she will get out.

In fact, Mrs. Stern bears more than a little resemblance to another play that recently played 59e59, Arlene Hutton’s Blood of the Lamb. In that play, too, a young woman is held prisoner by an inquisitor representing an ominous political ideology (in Hutton’s play, the inquisitor is an official of a state determined to use its anti-choice laws to force a woman to carry a dead baby to term). In both plays, the characters transcend their roles as interrogators and prisoners and begin to recognize the humanity in each other.

It is a mark of Bader’s craft that she is able to sustain a full play with so few characters without repeating herself. (A third character, a Jewish lawyer offering help of dubious value, also has a significant scene.) Bader invests Frick with enough glimmerings of independence to give Brett Temple the opportunity to escape the stereotype of the Nazi interrogator we have seen in countless films. Even more impressively, Ella Dershowitz pulls off the not-inconsiderable challenge of being credible as someone with the potential to grow into a leading public intellectual. Under the direction of Ari Laura Kreith, the show offers 90 minutes of thought-provoking, tense drama.

As I write this, we don’t have the comfort to think that this is just a story of something that happened a little less than a century ago. Frick represents a state that imprisons and kills to control information. Trump is suggesting he hopes to have the power to revenge himself on news outlets that displease him. And the LA Times and the Washington Post appear to have buckled under his threat.