Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I was raised in a suburb of Chicago, and, though I’ve lived in New York since 1967, when the word “home” is mentioned, it is that place that comes to mind. I spent the summer of 1968 in that suburb (Evanston). I did not go downtown when the cops of Chicago went nuts and beat the crap out of a lot of people roughly my age who protested the Democratic Convention and our presence in Vietnam. Like “the whole world” that was watching, I sat in front of a TV and witnessed official power being used illegitimately. And now, more than a half century later, on TV I again watch official power being used illegitimately in Chicago. In 1968, it was cops acting at the behest of the first Mayor Daley in support of the hawk wing of the Democratic Party. Today, it’s ICE in support of the fascist wing of the Republican Party. These thoughts couldn’t help but come to mind watching Crooked Cross and And Then We Were No More.

Crooked Cross (at Jonathan Bank’s Mint Theater) is set in 1933 in Bavaria as Nazis are beginning to take power. And Then We Were No More takes place in a hypothetical future when an authoritarian regime still kind of pretends that due process means something.

Crooked Cross was originally a novel by British writer Sally Carson. I gather its genesis was what she observed on a visit to Germany. She must have written furiously, because her novel (which was enthusiastically received) was published in 1934, and she wrote a successful stage adaptation in ten days that also came out in 1934. The Olympic games when Jesse Owens triumphed to Hitler’s displeasure were held in Berlin in 1936, and Kristallnacht occured in 1938. So Carson was writing before a lot of people outside Germany had awakened to what was going on.

The novel is about a family in a town in Germany. There are two sons and a daughter. The two sons have had little gainful employment because of the Depression, and the daughter is engaged to a doctor in town. The sons like their sister’s fiancé. But they have an opportunity to work if they join the Nazi Party. So they do. And it gets difficult because their sister’s fiancé has been classified as a Jew. It doesn’t end well.

Tim Blake Nelson’s And Then We Were No More (at LaMama) is set in the future sometime after an authoritarian regime with close ties to industry has come to power. A lawyer is pressured into representing a woman who has gone nuts and killed her family and is sentenced to die. As the hearing proceeds, the lawyer (played by the always-compelling Elizabeth Marvel) realizes that nothing she can do will affect the outcome in the slightest. She has been recruited to create the impression of due process when in fact the fate of her client has been determined before the first word of the hearing is said.

What is most effective about Nelson’s script is that the villains of the piece refuse to behave like villains. They speak in reasonable tones and offer little courtesies easily. The manners are sympathetic and correct. But again, it doesn’t end well.

I doubt that the producers of the shows at the Mint and La Mama consulted with each other and said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we produced a couple of plays set before and after the imposition of authoritarianism?” For some reason it occurred to them separately to engage the subject.

For some reason.