An event such as the Holocaust, however, defies the possible and the probable.  There can be no ego transference into the unimaginable world of the concentration camp universe:  There can be no catharsis in the enactment of mass murder.  The Holocaust is an event which should not, logically, lend itself to conventional dramatic representation.  Despite the apparent impossibility of the task, there have been numerous theatrical treatments of the topic.  To date, in excess of one hundred and fifty plays have been produced professionally about the Holocaust in the United States, Europe and Israel.  Rarely, if ever, in the history of world theater has an event been dramatized so often, in so many ways, in so short a period of time.

But how have playwrights dramatized something that is apparently impossible to represent?  For the most part, they have simplified the complexity of the event to make it accessible, and the magnitude of the horror has been sanitized so that it does not offend audience sensibilities.  Many playwrights have sought—in the words of Lawrence Langer—to "Americanize" and universalize the event by imposing religious iconography, providing climatic moments of exultation, and delivering moral exemplars.4

The tragic mode is most often used in dramatizing the Holocaust.  Jews are represented as either innocent sacrificial victims or as long suffering tragic figures.   Anne Frank, Edith Stein, Hannah Senesh, and Janusz Korczak are the sacrificial victims of innocence and purity.  Rumkowski, Gens, Kastner, Brand, and Czerniakow are the Faustian figures who, in striking bargains with the Nazis, suffer on behalf of their fellow men.   In Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy and Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy, righteous Gentiles sacrifice themselves on behalf of Jews.  In Millard Lampell's dramatization of John Hersey's The Wall, the hero, Berson, gives up his life to save his comrades, and in Shimon Wincelberg's Resort 76, the protagonist, Blaustein, refuses to save himself by deserting his ailing wife.

The redemptive sacrifice of the protagonist in Holocaust drama serves to bring meaning to the demise of the community.  The violent death of the hero is represented as a transcendent act, in absentia, on behalf of family, comrades, or the community as a whole.  The hero, by choosing his or her own death, mitigates the arbitrariness, capriciousness, and ultimately the meaninglessness of mass murder.  Oftentimes when the hero or heroine dies, as he or she invariably must, the death occurs outside the view of the audience.  The death of the hero thus achieves an even greater redemptive status, in part, by the inherent mystery of the action.  The true horror of the Holocaust—the mechanized anonymous extermination of millions of innocent people—is transformed into something sublime and uplifting.

The critic Theodor Adorno was deeply troubled by this transformational  process. In an essay entitled "On Commitment," he defined the problem as the inescapable tendency of violence to be transfigured by the creative process.  Transfiguration occurs whenever a violent action is enacted upon the stage, but it is particularly prevalent in chronicles of the Holocaust.  The historical model is glorified, idealized, and spiritualized by artistic representations that seek to derive meaning from an ineffable situation. Adorno believed that transfiguration could not be avoided in conventional forms of dramatic representation:
 

... by turning suffering into images, despite all their hard implacability, they wound our shame before the victims.  For these are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.  ...  The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed.5

The Pip Simmons Group production of An Die Musik(1975) illustrated this paradox.  In this play, about a group of Jewish prisoners forced to play in a concentration camp orchestra, graphic violence is enacted in a shocking manner.  At one point, two women prisoners are brought forward:  The first is struck in the face and the other has her breasts exposed and fondled by the Nazi guard.  Shortly after, a male prisoner is brought downstage and the Nazi guard exposes his genitalia.  The guard taps the circumcised penis with his club and orders the rest of the prisoners to laugh at the "funny Jewish cut-off prick."7

An Die Musik comes dangerously close to turning historic reality into pornographic titillation.  Anthony Kubiak suggests that such an illustrative representation of terror is inherently problematic:

... because in performance what cannot be articulated must be shown, and when it is shown, it ceases to be what it is.  Thus when terror enters the information systems of performance, it ceases, in a sense, to be terror—which is unspeakable, and unrepresentable—and becomes a mask of itself.  Terror is then transformed into the imaging system of terrorism.8

Adorno's proscriptive solution to the problem of transfiguration is to embrace what he calls autonomous art.  The autonomous work of art "firmly negates empirical reality," and which "by merely existing endlessly reiterates guilt."  The autonomous work of art does not transfigure the violence of the oppressor.  It doe not exploit the suffering of the victims; it does not make the historical narrative more palatable or accessible.  Rather, to the contrary, it makes it unavoidable.  How is this done?  According to Adorno, by impacting directly upon the consciousness of the viewer without mitigation.  Works such as Schönberg's Survivor of Warsaw, Picasso's Guernica, or the literary works of Kafka and Beckett compel the changes of attitude that the committed art of Brecht and Sartre merely demand.

Adorno, fearful of transfiguration and exploitation, rejected all systematic forms of rational representation and the usage of the conventional narrative form.   His statement on autonomous art and his embrace of Beckett as its foremost practitioner, written in 1962, anticipated and helped to define what was to follow in literary fashion.
 
The imagistic art of Beckett has been widely emulated and resonances of it are found in many examples of Holocaust drama, particularly in Europe.  German, Polish, French and Czechoslovakian theater artists have created numerous postmodern visions of the Second World War and the Holocaust that are poetic and symbolic rather than rational and illusionary.  Many of these works, however, intentionally or not, have blurred the specificity of the historical circumstances.   The shocking and bewildering images in the Polish theater work of Kantor, Szjana, and Grotowski turn historical reality into metaphoric symbolism.  In Germany, Heiner Müller's plays—filled with grotesque and violent images—can only be decoded by the culturally and historically literate.  Audience members who are not cognizant of the historical situation are forced to draw reductive conclusions from such non-explicative representations.

Imagistic art is inherently a deconstructive mode of presentation in which the distance between signifier and signified is increased to the point where conclusive meaning is difficult—if not impossible—to derive.  Temporal, spatial, and cultural differences multiply the distance between a sign and its meaning.  Without exposition there is disorientation for those not initiated.  An imagistic theatrical production about the Holocaust may degenerate into a purely sensual experience.  In the postmodern theater, history is symbolized rather than mythologized; the narrative structure is replaced by a system of codes that stratify the audience into levels demarcated by metatheatrical knowledge.  According to Patrice Pavis, the "avant-garde theatre has brought about a crisis in the semiotic and referential relationship of the sign and the world."9

Adorno's solution to the problem of transfiguration, his embracement of non-linear and non-illusionary representation as the autonomous art of the future, has proven to be self-limited.  In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the theater of the absurd was self-explanatory and self-referential, but in the post-Cold War era this is no longer the case.  Postmodernism, the paradigm of the contemporary theater, is apparently incapable of representing near-term historical memory.

Friedrich Durrenmatt, in the introduction to his collected works, offers an alternative representational strategy.  Durrenmatt concurs with Adorno's assessment that the conventional theatrical modes of tragedy and melodrama are insufficient for representing the horrors of the twentieth century.  Only through comedy, according to Durrenmatt, can contemporary issues be addressed directly in the theater.  In addition, only a particular kind of comedy—the grotesque—is suitable because it is "a way of expressing in a tangible manner, of making us perceive physically the paradoxical, the form of the unformed, the face of a world without a face."10
 Durrenmatt refuses to relinquish the didactic and social function of theater, but concedes that audiences would never tolerate productions that present the violence and horrors of this century in an illusionistic manner.  By mounting comedies, however, the audience can be persuaded to enter the theater and remain.  In essence the audience is tricked into listening to things it would not otherwise tolerate.  By employing the comic mode, Durrenmatt believes that artists will be able to undercut the expectations and the emotional identification of the audience with the subject matter.  This will, in turn, open up a vacuum-like space for serious concerns to be realized without actually giving (false theatrical) substance to the horror depicted.

Numerous playwrights, including, C.P. Taylor,  Howard Brenton, Robert Shaw, Peter Flannery, George Tabori, and Peter Barnes have utilized grotesque comedic imagery in plays about Jews and Nazis.  The use of comedy as a device for representing genocide, however, is a questionable endeavor.  A number of critics including Henri Bergson, George Meredith and Northrop Frye have argued that comedy is intrinsically a conservative mode of representation.  Comedy has a reformative effect and ultimately reinforces the normative values of its time.  According to Frye, the theme of the comic is always the integration of society.  In other words, while most comedy attacks the social order, such works ultimately undercut their own critical stance by providing reassuring and happy endings that serve to promote the very hierarchies that are being assailed.  Thus jokes about Jewish suffering and Nazi barbarism may serve only to reinforce simplistic, reductive, and anti-semitic conceptions.11

Today, fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the conundrum of Holocaust representation remains unresolved.  There is no specific representational strategy that is preferable or appropriate for dramatizing the horror of the period.  The issue that confronts us as critics and directors is how to adjudicate the relative value of plays that have been produced.  The sensitivities surrounding the Holocaust are such that any representation is inherently a political and ethical statement—in essence a moral judgment—on both the perpetrators and the victims.12  Berel Lang asserts that "where the literary subject involves moral extremity, every element of its representation, including the act of representation itself, becomes morally significant."13

The only objective means for analyzing plays about such an emotional and controversial subject, outside of strictly aesthetic concerns, is the determination of the relationship between the work and the historical incident it purports to represent.  Critical analysis cannot determine the artistic truth of a representation, but it can gauge the veracity of historical references.  Dramatists who fabricate recorded events in order to manipulate audience response or to provide a sententious message can be challenged because their conclusions become suspect.  The intellectual validity of an endeavor is mitigated by the falsification of historical detail for aesthetic considerations.14

The difficulty in establishing such a criterion for literary analysis is self-evident.  The New Critic, the deconstructionist, and the self-proclaimed 'postmodernist' will argue that determining what is verifiable within a given historical narrative is an impossible task.  Hayden White, for example, argues that the pseudo-scientific assumptions of modern historiography are flawed because of the rhetorical strategies, narrative structures and poetic qualities inherent in historical writing.15   These attributes undermine the notion of objectivity, and call in to question the sanctified position of so-called "facts."

As an intellectual construct, this argument is compelling and leads to a healthy skepticism that insures a critical reading of historical texts.  Taken to an extreme, however, this line of reasoning leads invariably to the worst kind of neo-Platonic sophistry.  True, the narrative structure of historical writing inherently warps any interpretation of human endeavor, but nevertheless the 'facts' of history are discernible and decipherable.  Auschwitz is not an intellectual construct.  Hannah Arendt warned future historians that "history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion."16

The idea that veracity—respect for factual documentation—has no place whatsoever in artistic creativity is a reactionary position harking back to the Romanticism of Schiller, Coleridge, et al.  The didactic and social values of artistic representations of historical events are dependent upon a respect—albeit skeptical—for documented historical sources.  The rejoinder to this proposition is always the same: what about the obvious inaccuracies in the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, or Schiller?  Do we throw these representations onto the trash heap?  The answer, of course, is that we do not.  Why?  First, because these works, as Matthew Wikander articulately points out, reflect the historiographic and aesthetic principles of their time—not ours—and therefore cannot be judged by contemporary standards.17  Second, these works all deal with distant historical models that do not impinge politically upon our present situation.  Third, though these works have lost their didactic value in relationship to their historical models, they nevertheless retain importance as parables about the human condition.

Historical dramas, such as Shakespeare's Richard III or Schiller's Maria Stuart, deal with events so far in the past that they have lost their political point.  The legitimacy of Richard's ascension to the throne is an irrelevant issue to us in the twentieth century.  Performance of such a play gains validity and immediacy by means of analogy and, in essence, by becoming a parable.  The historical accuracy—or inaccuracy—of Shakespeare's original text is irrelevant to the purpose of a contemporary production.
 Plays about recent events, that use specific historic figures and incidents, require a stricter historical accounting.  Plays that address contentious social, ethical, and philosophical topics have an obligation to the documented evidence.  If a work is grounded within a resonating historical model, employs naturalistic techniques to suggest veracity, and uses the highly charged symbolism of the swastika, the aborted fetus, or the burning cross, then an author cannot manipulate randomly the historical record by changing dates, altering numbers, or falsely attributing statements and actions to historical figures.  Such alterations undermine the philosophical and political conclusions of the work.  Literary or dramatic artifice does not abrogate moral and social responsibility.
 

Holocaust drama is a subgenre in the field of Holocaust literature.  It is composed of works that represent or allude to the racial policies of the Nazis.    A dramatic text about the destruction of European Jewry is obviously a type of Holocaust literature.  But, like film, a theatrical representation of a literary text is a complicated project involving much more than merely the written word.  Both film and theater utilize visual imagery that can only be imagined when reading literature.  In addition, both of these visual forms use music, sound effects, costumes, settings, and the represented human figure.  The critic Keir Elam asserts that visual representation involves a process of "ostension" which sets it apart from other forms of art, particularly literature.18  According to Elam, "this ostensive aspect of the stage 'show' distinguishes it, for example, from narrative, where persons, objects and events are necessarily described and recounted."19

The playwright wishing to grapple with the topic of Nazi atrocities has unique problems.  Paul Celan's poetry or Elie Wiesel's prose invites the reader to ponder privately, reread, and seek insight in other primary and secondary sources.  In the confines of the darkened theater, however, the audience communally experiences an unfolding event that is both physically tangible and temporally unique.  A play written on this subject therefore must be viewed as a script to be enacted and not merely as a literary text to be analyzed.  Theater is even more problematic than film, because of the physical presence of actors in a space shared with an audience. The enactment of the historical material confronts the audience without insulation or mediation.  Unlike film which is a relatively permanent creation, theater—according to Peter Brook—"is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind."20
 Initially, the subgenre of Holocaust drama developed quite slowly.  There was no rush to write or produce plays on the topic following the conclusion of the Second World War.  The situation did not improve much during the 1950s when only a handful of works—most notably The Diary of Anne Frank—were mounted.  This dearth in output reflected, in part, the apathetic attitude of the American and European public towards the historical catastrophe.
 
The situation changed radically in 1960 when Israeli agents abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina.  The controversy surrounding the capture, trial, and execution of Eichmann coincided with the American publication of a series of works that brought Holocaust studies into the mainstream of intellectual discourse.  Elie Wiesel's Night, Bruno Bettelheim's The Informed Heart, and William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich were published in 1960.  Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews were published in 1961 and Viktor Frankl's Auschwitz memoir Man's Search for Meaning was published in 1962.  The most controversial work that appeared during this period was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, initially serialized in The New Yorker (1963-64).

The impact of these scholarly works was quite significant, but even more important was the timing of their appearance.  The emergence and triumphs of the civil rights movement during the early 1960s and the vocal affirmation of Black pride that accompanied it led to a resurgence among other minority groups that, according to Michael Berenbaum, "made assertions of Jewish solidarity more acceptable."21

This new attitude was reflected on Broadway in 1963 and 1964 when plays about civil rights and the Holocaust predominated.  Plays about Nazi Germany mounted at this time included: Andorra (1963), Eternal Sabbath (1963), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1963), The Sage of Rottenburg (1963), After the Fall (1964), Children of the Shadows (1964), The Deputy (1964), The Comforter (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), and a revised version of The Wall (1964) at the Arena Stage in Washington.

Leon A. Jick argues, however, that the culminating event in reviving interest about the Holocaust, particularly among American Jews, occurred in the months preceding the Six Day War when Arab leaders spouted rhetoric that was frighteningly similar to that of the Nazis.  Jick maintains that Arab threats to drive the Jews into the sea galvanized the American Jewish community.22

An analysis of the New York theater scene in 1968 confirms Jick's analysis.  In 1966, and 1967, Ulu Grosbard's mounting of Peter Weiss' The Investigation (1965), was the only play about the Holocaust produced in New York City.  In 1968, one year after The Six Day War, there was a remarkable output: Jakov Lind's Ergo, Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth, George Tabori's The Cannibals, Stanley Eveling's The Strange Case of Martin Richter, John Allen's The Other Man, and a Guthrie Theater revival in New York of Brecht's Arturo Ui.  These works comprised the 'second' wave in the production of Holocaust drama.
 During the early 1970s there was a sharp downturn in the production of plays about the Holocaust in the United States.  This was due in large measure to the public's preoccupation with the Vietnam War and the unfolding of the Watergate crisis.  In the late 1970s, however, there was a gradual renewal of interest that turned into an avalanche during the 1980s.

This 'third' wave was spurred on by a multitude of factors.  First, a series of events occurred that contained disturbing historical resonances that were stark reminders of the past:  The arrest of Klaus Barbie; the sale of chemicals by the Imhausen corporation to Libya; Reagan at Bitburg; the controversy surrounding the Carmelite nunnery at Auschwitz; the election of Kurt Waldheim to the presidency of Austria; the trial of Demjanjuk in Israel; and the resurgence of fascist political parties across Europe.

A second, more profound reason, for the upsurge in play production during the 1980s was due to temporal realities.  Playwrights were growing ever more aware of the mortality and fatality that hung over all facets of Holocaust scholarship and representation.  Many writers became concerned, if not obsessed, with the impending change in Holocaust studies from a contemporary to a historical concern.  The death of each survivor represents the destruction of testimony and the obliteration of memory.  Whereas in the 1960s there was an apparent widespread desire among playwrights to inform, in the 1980s and 1990s there was, and continues to be, a new drive to remember and catalogue before it is too late.  These issues have been articulated in recent dramatic works by Emily Mann, Jon Robin Baitz and Cynthia Ozick.

Holocaust drama can be reductively organized into three major groupings; Ghetto and Martyr drama, Survivor drama, and Death Camp drama.  Ghetto and Martyr dramas are those works that utilize theatrical illusion to recreate historical circumstances leading up to destruction.  Plays are set in a variety of locations throughout Nazi-occupied Europe such as the tenement, the police station, the factory, the claustrophobic apartment, and the alleyway.

Ghetto and Martyr dramas occur in recognizable and approachable settings that are distanced spatially from the ineffable world of the death camps.  This enables, and encourages, the audience to identify and empathize with the situation being represented.  Works in this category include, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), Erwin Sylvanus' Korczak and the Children (1958), Millard Lampell's The Wall (1960, rev. 1964), Shimon Wincelberg's The Windows of Heaven (1962, rev. and retitled Resort 76 in 1981), Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy (1964), Liliane Atlan's Mister Fugue and the Sick Earth (1967), Edith and Harold Lieberman's Throne of Straw (1972), Jean-Claude Grumberg's Dreyfus (1974) and The Free Zone (1991), Susan Nanus' The Survivor (1981) David Schechter's Hannah Senesh (1984), Arthur Giron's Edith Stein (1969, rev. 1987), Bob Merrill's Hannah ... 1939 (1990), and Gilles Ségal's All the Tricks But One (1991).

Survivor drama, the most prevalent form of Holocaust enactment, represents events that transpire after the historical occurrence.  The protagonists are haunted, pursued, or obsessed by aspects of the Holocaust that intrude into their contemporary lives.  Survivor dramas are based upon the conceit that both the victims and the perpetrators are present on the stage and potentially in the audience.

Plays that explore the ramifications of the catastrophe rather than the particular circumstances of the mass destruction tend to be temporally and spatially distanced from the event.  This separation of time and space enables playwrights to avoid the direct representation of the horror.  George Tabori's Flight into Egypt (1952) occurs in Cairo of 1951.  Peter Weiss' The Investigation (1965) is a documentary reenactment of the Frankfurt trials held in 1963-1964.  Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth (1967) moves the action from New York City to Israel in 1965.  The opening and concluding scenes of Tabori's The Cannibals (1968) occur in New York during the 1960s.  Jean-Claude Grumberg's The Workroom (1979) takes place between 1945 and 1952 in a Parisian sweatshop.  Christopher Hampton's The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1982) tracks down Hitler in 1979 somewhere in the jungles of South America.  Michael Cristofer's Black Angel (1982) is set in France during the 1970s.  Barbara Lebow's A Shayna Maidel (1985) dramatizes a family reconciliation in New York during 1946.  Emily Mann's Anulla, An Autobiography (1985) is set in a London flat in 1974.  Jim Allen's Perdition (1987) is a fictional enactment of a British libel trial in 1967, Gilles Ségal's The Puppetmaster of Lodz (1989) is set in Berlin of 1950, Peter Flannery's Singer (1990) is an epic drama that unfolds in England between 1945 and 1990. and Cynthia Ozick’s Blue Light (1994) is set in Miami, Florida in 1979.

The temporal and spatial separation between the dramatic action and the historical model in each of these plays is bridged by modes of exposition that describe the unbearable in lieu of enactment.  The flashback, the dream sequence, the vivid memory, the discovered document, and courtroom testimony provide the details of a past that impacts upon the present.  Common themes include the guilt of survival, the compulsion to remember, and the desire for justice and/or revenge.   The passage of time, however, is beginning to change the character of Survivor drama from a contemporary form to a historical one.  The temporal and spatial distance that was sought in early Survivor drama, due to the freshness of the pain, has become the unavoidable distance one feels from an event that occurred over half a century ago.  As the end of this century approaches, a new type of Survivor drama has begun to emerge that represents the impact of the Holocaust upon the next generation.  This type of Holocaust Drama—still in a nascent stage—examines the alienation between survivors and their children and the long-term legacy of the event.  Plays in this category include Jon Robin Baitz's The Substance of Fire (1991), Sybille Pearson’s Unfinished Stories (1992), Deb Filler’s and Allison Summers’ Punch Me in the Stomach (1992), and Diane Samuels' Kindertransport (1993).

Death Camp dramas are those works that attempt to represent the unimaginable process of mechanized extermination.  They are the rarest and, without exception, the most problematic type of plays in the subgenre of Holocaust drama.  Concentration camps were represented on the stage in the 1930s and 1940s in such works as Maxwell Anderson's Candle in the Wind and Bertolt Brecht's Private Life of the Master Race.  But these plays presented the camps as essentially just prisons.  In the 1950s no playwright dared to represent a killing center on the stage.  In the 1960s, however, three important European works provided paradigmatic models for future Anglo-American representations: Jerzy Grotowski's Akropolis, Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, and Charlotte Delbo's Who Will Carry the Word.

In the 1970s and 1980s a handful of plays about death camp experiences were produced in the US and Britain.  The most significant of these works include The Pip Simmons Group's An die Musik (1975), The Trinity Repertory Company's production of James Schevill's Cathedral of Ice (1975), Peter Barnes' Laughter! (1978), Martin Sherman's Bent (1979), C.P. Taylor's Good (1982), and Stacy Klein's Song of Absence (1989).  Another play that lies figuratively and literally on the edge of the deathcamps is Melvin I. Cooperman’s Dispatches From Hell (1985).
 

I would suggest that Skloot's critical stance would be much improved if he did not—a priori—reject the validity of a dramatic representation because it suggests a contrary religious or political viewpoint.  This is a trap that Elie Wiesel has also fallen into.  Wiesel urges artists to demonstrate sensitivity and respect for the victims.  He bemoans the fact that we are currently "living through a period of general de-sanctification of the Holocaust."28  Skloot's and Wiesel's position has emotional resonance, but it is inadequate because artists cannot be constrained in matters of interpretation.  Such a critical stance is untenable and unnecessary.  Steven Katz argues that such an idealistic approach is intellectually counter-productive:
 

For Wiesel and many other survivors and scholars, the holocaust can best be comprehended by the reverence of silence that surrounds a mystery. ... While I agree with Wiesel’s argument against the trivialization of the holocaust through popularizations and respect him immensely, an exclusively Platonic stance toward the holocaust prevents us from fully understanding how it happened, and from understanding the relationship it reveals between rhetoric and ethics.29

There can be no taboo subjects in Holocaust studies and there can be no prescriptive rules regarding representation.  But the artist who misconstrues the historical record or manipulates Holocaust imagery for artistic or political purposes can and should be challenged.  The artist, however, who delves into sensitive areas and reaches unpopular conclusions should not be criticized unless there is a egregious distortion of the facts
.

The essay "Arthur Miller and the Holocaust" illustrates how certain dramatists consciously and deliberately manipulate the historical record in order to champion a particular interpretation of the event.  Miller uses the vehicles of After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, Playing for Time, and Broken Glass to set forth a humanistic and universalistic view of the historical catastrophe.  The characters in his plays make philosophical pronouncements upon some of the most contentious issues in Holocaust studies.  Miller, however, undermines the intellectual validity of his endeavor by creating fallacious historical situations structured to support his own interpretation.  He invokes the notion of poetic license whenever the facts of history intrude upon his narrative, and in the end, history suffers for it.

"Towards a Feminist Perspective" places Emily Mann's Annulla: An Autobiography and Barbara Lebow's A Shayna Maidel into  context with work by feminist historians such as Gisela Bock, Claudia Koonz, and Sybil Milton, and feminist literary critics such as Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan, Vivian Patraka, and Hanna Scolnicov.  Mann and Lebow, in two vastly different narratives about female Holocaust survivors, explore the idea that fascist attitudes and Nazi policies were outgrowths of an overly patriarchal society.  In conventional Holocaust dramas, female characters are reduced usually to stereotypical male fantasy figures.  Women are presented as either virginal sacrificial victims or as objects for whom men immolate themselves.  Emily Mann and Barbara Lebow create female characters who transcend such images.  The protagonist in each play is a strong-willed independent woman who has survived Nazi persecution.

 "German Theatrical Responses" looks at the plays of Brecht, Sylvanus, Hochhuth, and Weiss that deal or allude to the racial policies of the Nazis.  All four writers view the Holocaust through idiosyncratic terministic screens.  Brecht's plays championed a Marxist interpretation of the historical event, but ultimately failed because the irrational and self-destructive nature of the Nazi movement defied the reductive quality of an analysis predicated upon historical materialism.  Nevertheless, Brecht's work set important precedents that were later emulated by other playwrights, particularly Peter Weiss.  Weiss, borrowing both form and philosophy from Brecht, sought to create a lehrstucke that would demonstrate how German industrialists profited from the Nazi policy of genocide.  Weiss, however, failed in his endeavor because in his attempt to universalize the material he undermined the validity of his documentation.

Erwin Sylvanus emulates Pirandello in his play Korczak and the Children, but falls short of the mark by presenting a simplistic, reductive and erroneous chronicle of events in the Warsaw Ghetto.   At the end of play, the author abandons a Pirandellian strategy and embraces the conventions of Christian tragedy.  Rolf Hochhuth also utilizes the conventions of redemptive sacrifice in The Deputy.  Hochhuth creates a Schilleresque historical drama that concludes in a violent melodramatic spasm of self-sacrifice.  The play is about a pair of righteous Gentiles—one a priest and one a Nazi officer—who seek to stop the murder of Jews.  The play, which premiered in the early 1960s, caused a major controversy because it directly implicated the Catholic Church, and particularly the Pope, in the destruction of European Jewry.  As a direct result of Hochhuth's play, a number of historians—including Saul Friedländer—were prompted to investigate the question of Papal responsibility.

Some of the most compelling plays about the Holocaust are described in the essay "French Theatrical Responses."  Charlotte Delbo, Lilliane Atlan, Jean-Claude Grumberg and Gilles Ségal have created works that are eminently effective, historically accurate, and aesthetically pleasing.  Delbo's Who Will Carry the Word? is a shocking tour de force about a group of French women who were sent to Auschwitz as slave laborers.  Atlan's Mister Fugue and the Sick Earth dramatizes the dreams and fantasies of a group of Jewish children who are being transported to a killing ground.  Jean-Claude Grumberg, in a trilogy of works (Dreyfus, The Workroom and The Free Zone), provides a snapshot view of European Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.  Gilles Ségal in The Puppetmaster of Lodz and in All the Tricks But One combines puppetry, mime, performance art, and melodrama to create wildly theatrical works that are shocking and entertaining.  Unfortunately none of these French plays have been performed on Broadway or the West End, and thus remain relatively unknown to the general public in the English speaking world.

The essay "Contaminated by Death" looks at the work of George Tabori and Josef Szajna.  The Holocaust was a pivotal event in the life of both men.  Tabori lost his father in a deathcamp, and Szajna was a prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.  Tabori has returned repeatedly to the topic of the Holocaust in a series of works that he has either written or translated.  In plays such as Flight Into Egypt, The Cannibals, Shylock Improvisations, My Mother's Courage, Jubilee, and Mein Kampf he has utilized a variety of dramaturgical strategies to represent aspects of the Nazi era and anti-semitism

Josef Szajna is one of the foremost creators of imagistic art.  He rejects the notion of traditional theater and believes instead in theatrical art.  He seeks abstraction in his works and despises melodrama.  Szajna first began creating performance art pieces about the Holocaust in 1961 when he collaborated with Jerzy Grotowski on Akropolis.  Since then he has created a series of pieces—Empty Fields, Reminiscences, and Replikathat have sought to recreate tangibly the physical space of destruction.  He utilizes found objects, historical photographs, children's toys, and the sensibilities of a visual artist to create suggestive nonspecific performance areas.  Szajna, however, is an idiosyncratic artist who, like his fellow Poles Kantor and Grotowski, creates works that are impossible to define and to reproduce.  Szajna's dramatic scenarios are personal visions and not performance texts.

Almost every play that has been written about the Holocaust has become embroiled, to some extent, in controversy.  Even a seemingly innocuous piece like The Diary of Anne Frank was involved in a critical and legal firestorm.  Terms like revisionist and exploitative have been bandied about and used to attack and denigrate numerous pieces.  Unfortunately these words have been so overused that their impact has been diluted.  A small handful of works, however, seem to merit such an extreme rubric.  Two such plays, Jim Allen's Perdition and Arthur Giron's Edith Stein are examined in an essay entitled "Theatrical Exploitation of the Holocaust."  Both of these works misconstrue and falsify historical evidence in order to substantiate fallacious political and religious interpretations of the historical event.  In Perdition, Jim Allen argues that there was a conspiracy between the Zionists and the Nazis to rid Europe of Jews.  In Arthur Giron's Edith Stein, the controversy surrounding the Carmelite nunnery at Auschwitz is misrepresented and falsified for commercial expediency.  Both authors present revisionist views of the historical event.

Martin Sherman's Bent, like Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, investigates an area of Holocaust studies that had been ignored previously by historians.  The essay "Opening the Forbidden Closet" examines Sherman's attempt to dramatize the suffering of the German gay population under Nazi rule.  The play caused a bitter controversy between the American Jewish and gay populations because each group believed that the other was ignoring the primacy of their suffering.

The most effective appropriation of Holocaust imagery thus far for political and dramatic purposes has been by the gay community.  "The Holocaust, Homosexuality and AIDS" looks at how that group expropriated the symbolism of the Holocaust to raise America's consciousness about the AIDS crisis.

In order to reinforce the connection between the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis, gay organizations utilized historical symbolism.  The pink triangle, initially created by the Nazis to identify gay prisoners in the concentration camps, was transformed into a symbol of pride and solidarity after the premiere of Bent in 1979.  In 1987, the organization ACT-UP co-opted the pink triangle and turned it into a signifier of defiance and outrage.

The volume concludes with a discussion on the metaphoric manipulation of the Holocaust in dramatic literature and political discourse.  The misuse of Holocaust symbolism and terminology is rampant as various groups seek to exploit the emotional resonance of the historical event.  Rhetorical hyperbole, historical misappropriation, and political manipulation are widespread.
  Such exploitative practices can only be avoided when there is respect for the documented record.  The ethical and philosophical ramifications of the Holocaust will be debated for a millennium, the causality will be argued, the role of the Judenräte will be second-guessed, and a plethora of other aspects will be the subject of disputation, but the means of destruction—the process of genocide—is set down in a mountain of raw documentation.  There will continue to be a wide divergence in opinion regarding the meaning and significance of the event, but there can be no debate about the historical reality.

Literature and drama are appropriate forums for addressing the ethical and philosophical issues of the Holocaust.  These works, however, if they are to have any social or didactic value, must be grounded in the documented evidence. Authorial responsibility does not preclude imaginative reconstruction, symbolic overtones, a variety of theatrical devices, or any particular representational strategy.  It merely holds the author accountable and denies the unmitigated license of unencumbered poetic license.

A century ago, the critic and playwright Alessandro Manzoni asserted that the quality of a representation was dependent upon the artistry of craft and not necessarily originality: "If one takes away from the poet what distinguishes him from a historian, the right to invent facts, what is left?  Poetry; yes, poetry.  For what, in the end, does history give us?  Events that are known only, so to speak, from the outside."30

The scope of the Holocaust overwhelms the human imagination.  We are lost in a sea of figures, dates, geographic locations, transportation schedules, and testimony.  An artistic representation can bring form to this chaos.  In 1990, the Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész wrote that "we may form a realistic view of the Holocaust, this incomprehensible and confusing reality, only with the help of our aesthetic imagination."31

Successful representations of the Holocaust do not misconstrue the documented evidence or transfigure the violence of the oppressors.  These works, if not aesthetically pleasing, are at least satisfying.  They contribute to the post-Holocaust discourse by illustrating  the social and ethical issues that swirl around the event.  They create communal experiences that serve the social function of remembrance while didactically transmitting information.  Only a handful of works have achieved all these goals simultaneously.  These are the plays that have solved the conundrum of Holocaust representation.
 

1.  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.  Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), 73; Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) 40.

 2.  LeRoi Jones, Dutchman (New York: William Morrow, 1964), 29.

 3.  Friedrich Schiller, "On the Tragic Art," Aesthetical Letters and Essays, ed. and trans. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Dana Estes, 1902), 58.

 4.  Lawrence Langer, "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen," From Hester Street to Hollywood, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983), 214.

 5.  Theodor Adorno, "On Commitment," trans. Frances McDonagh, Performing Arts Journal 3, no. 3 (1979): 61.

 6.  David Graver, "Violent Theatricality: Displayed Enactments of Aggression and Pain." Theatre Journal 47, no. 1 (March 1995): 46.

 7. Theodore Shank, "The Pip Simmons Group," The Drama Review 19, no. 4 (1975): 45.

 8. Anthony Kubiak, "Stages of Terror," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 4, no. 1 (1989): 13.

 9.  Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 185.

 10.  Friedrich Durrenmatt, "Problems of the Theatre," Four Plays, trans. Gerhard Nellhaus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 31.

 11.  Susan Carlson, "Comic Collisions: Conventions, Rage, and Order,"  New Theatre Quarterly 3, no. 12 (1987): 303.

 12.  Jacob Katz, "Was the Holocaust Predictable?," Commentary 59, no.5 (1975): 44.

 13. Lang, Berel Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide  (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,  1990), 124.

 14.  See Richard Bernstein’s "Can Movies Teach History," New York Times, 26 November 1989, sec. II, pp. 1-2.

 15. See Robert Braun’s, "The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (May 1994): 172-197; and Berel Lang’s response, "Is It Possible to Misrepresent the Holocaust?" History and Theory 34, no. 1 (February 1995): 84-89; see also Hayden White’s Tropics in Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978); and James E. Young’s, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

 16.  Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951; rpt.(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1981), 9.

 17.  Matthew H. Wikander, The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1986), 29.

 18. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 29.

 19. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 30.

 20. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968,) 15.

 21. Michael Berenbaum, "The Nativization of the Holocaust," Judaism 35, no. 4 (1986): 448.

 22.  See Leon A. Jick’s "The Holocaust: its Use and Abuse within the American Public," Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 14 - XIV, ed. Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem: Alpha Press, 1981), 313.

 23. Robert Skloot, The Theatre of the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 14.

 24. Robert Skloot, "Directing the Holocaust Play," Theatre Journal 31, no. 4 (1979): 529.

 25. Skloot, "Directing the Holocaust Play," 529.

 26. C.P. Taylor, Good: A Tragedy (London: Methuen Press, 1982), xii.

 27.  See Alice L. and Roy Eckardt’s "The Holocaust and the Enigma of Uniqueness: a Philosophical Effort at Practical Clarification," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450 (July 1980): 153-177.

 28. Elie Wiesel, "Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory," New York Times 11 June 1989, sec. 2, p. 38.

 29. Katz, Steven B., "The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust," College English 54, no.3 (March 1992): 258-9.

 30. Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel. trans. Sandra Berman (Lincoln: University of Nebreska Press, 1984), 23.

 31. Braun, "The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation," 174.