A CurtainUp Interview

by Les Gutman

Josh Tarjan: I had been reading the Helen Epstein book, and I told Adam about it. [The two met as theater students at Columbia.] The book really was a revelation, at least to me. I suddenly realized my whole life was running along this algorithm of the Holocaust. Adam said, if we are all jumping out of airplanes and doing that sort of thing, then why not -- he said it jokingly -- create an actual concentration camp? We laughed about it and said, “Hey, that's an idea for a play.” (Adam thought we should make it a musical.) Later, we were on the subway and I said we have to do it as a play. Right then and there on the train, we basically came up with all the major plot points.

Adam Melnick: I had read a long time ago -- I don't know if it was the National Enquirer or The Sun or something, I assume it was made-up -- that there was a place in England where people had gone and paid to be in a prisoner-of-war camp or concentration camp. And we started talking about it.

JT: Spring of ‘97.

AM: We wrote it in six weeks in the spring and then Josh did a workshop production in the fall.

JT: December of ‘97.

JT: My father survived the Holocaust, and lost his family. He grew up in Communist Hungary and then came to the United States in 1956. I spent time in Poland after college -- I went there to study theater -- and when I came back, I did have a conversation with the rabbi of the synagogue that my parents belonged to. He's a Holocaust survivor himself, and he did say to me [as the rabbi in the play echoes] that Jews have no business going back to Poland. So there are certain autobiographical elements, but we did change things around.

AM: My mom was born in France, the daughter of two Polish immigrants, and she was there during the occupation. She and her mother -- my grandmother -- escaped to Vichy and from there to Morocco and then to America. I don't think I have the same issues -- the “danger” thing [in Epstein's book] didn't resonate for me. But what resonated for me in that book was -- there's always this thing in the back of your head that the whole world might fall apart, and that you look in a mate for someone who might help you survive this major catastrophe. Josh and I would joke about keeping silver under the bed just in case the monetary system collapses. It's a joke but [for us] there's an element of truth in it. 

JT: I think I was closer. I would do extreme things; the reason I was going rock climbing and white water kayaking was because of the Holocaust, and I have to say I was obsessed -- I was always reading books about the Holocaust. After we wrote the play, I felt my mind had somehow cleared. So for me I know those things were definitely linked.

AM: I think the issues manifest slightly different for me. I remember when we moved to my town up in Westchester, it was a small village then, and the Police came to the door to welcome us as new people. My mother totally freaked out and brought us all into the kitchen and huddled us together. She wouldn't answer the door for about five minutes because the cops had come. I think that kind of fear is inherited, that fear of authority, fear that something dreadfully wrong can happen at any moment.

JT: I think you grow up with a sense that the world is not a safe place. I have to say I over-reacted to Y2K. While most Americans believed nothing bad could ever happen, I looked at the  rest of the world and at World War II and thought horrible things can happen.

AM: Well I have a friend who was not at all religious -- I was brought up a Reform Jew and he was not -- and later on he became very religious. I visited him in Israel once and a bunch of his friends were part of this whole new movement of people who become religious from non-religious families -- there are a couple of Yeshivas that cater to these people. I was amazed at how much of their education, their ideology, was centered around the Holocaust. I was blown away that it was central to their idea of what a Jew was. To me that's what the play is about. It is about the Holocaust but it is about how we relate to the Holocaust as Jews -- more generally about identifying with any one thing so strongly it becomes your whole identity. 

JT: My father was very open -- he'd tell you whatever you wanted to know about his experiences even though he may not have come to terms with his own sense of loss. When he read the play, he was appalled by it, but he's going to come see it. I think he's very much like the mother in that sense. I don't think Ed's mother is unwilling to talk about the Holocaust. I think it's just the idea of building the camp that's an appalling idea. 

AM: We wanted someone, a typical person who is absolutely identified 100% as a Jew as victim, as the oppressed  -- "My people were victims". Everyone else had the attitude, "we are this, they are them, and we've got to protect ourselves".

JT: And we found that in a cantankerous old man from New York. 

JT: The Polish stereotypes we're looking at-- I did a workshop with a Polish theater group called Gardzienice. They live in a remote area outside of Lublin. They run through the woods late at night, they go to farm villages and collect material -- indigenous folk material, songs and so on -- and make these fantastic pieces, but the locals don't know what to make of them. Someone told me the farmers often referred to the theater company as a bunch of Freemasons and Jews because they make no sense to them. But as far as the young Poles, I found that there was a fascination with Jewish culture. When the theater runs, say, The Magician of Lublin, it's always sold out. 

AM: Josh used to say, before I went, imagine if one day all of the black people in America were gone. The buildings and the neighborhoods were there, and the music. Young people would ask, where did this form come from? Where did this music come from? This slang? And we would say, there used to be this people, but they are no longer around. So Josh explained that's what the young Poles felt--that it was "a part of their soul" --that's a line we used actually in the play.

AM: The sensitive Germans -- I've known German people like that, of course we pushed to extremes.

JT: I had a German girlfriend. I met her in Poland. She was coming to Poland to work in a concentration camp: picking weeds, working in the archives. She was remotely with a group of young Germans who were coming to Poland to do the same thing. They would meet whatever remaining Jews were left and there is this sense that they want to atone. 

AM: If you look at it, everyone is a stereotype, and it's purposeful. Everyone besides Ed. And even the relationship Ed has, the romance, is like a movie, and then it goes wrong. These stereotypes have an energy that goes in a certain direction and that causes everyone to accept this totally insane situation as normal. And in this crazy world where we are all told these things to be by the dominant paradigm, what happens when you step outside? Maybe there is this idea of a Platonic ideal -- that there are some things that have power and if you touch them and create them they reproduce themselves. So the Germans become guards, the Poles go outside and the Jews want to be prisoners.

JT: There was recently an article in Harper's, an essay by an art historian talking about how art in America has become this very safe, banal haven whereas what art really can be is a place where we can examine the anxieties of a society. We don't build an actual concentration camp. It's a thought experiment in theater, which people still react to as though we have actually gone and built the camp. That's what you can do in art, and that's what more art should be doing, I think. I would say there's very little political consciousness that we see in theater. That's not to say our play is political but certainly we are talking about issues. I wish people would talk more about actual world events, things that are happening in our society, rather than just entertaining. I think that's why people think theater is dead. It's not because theater is inherently dead; it's because of the material people are choosing. You have to read outside of conventional media -- there's so much material to be harvested. 

AM: To me what's interesting about the play and what the play addresses is how we live our lives, and how we do so dominated by certain ideas. That is political, though not political in terms of nation-states. For the most part, people doing off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway want to be doing Broadway and movies, and so we are all a part of this machine that Brecht talks about that's handing out this same material over and over again, with the same way of approaching things. Most people are not questioning the dominant paradigm -- if I can say that twice in this interview -- on a national, social or personal level. That's what I hope this play is beginning to touch. Theater is cheap, and that's its power. And it's alive--it can change from performance to performance. And that is also its power. 

JT: So I guess you could say our play is revolutionizing theater -- just kidding, but you can put that in quotes in the interview anyway.