Margin Notes: A Will To Live

Masha King as Helene Weinrauch.
Photo by David Zayas, Jr.

A Will To Live

Seen on: Saturday, 8/26/23.

Plot and Background

A one-woman play adaptation of Helena Weinrauch's memoir. She wrote her memoir while she was still recuperating in a Swedish hospital after surviving three concentration camps and a death march. Adapter (and Chain Artistic Director) Kirk Goskowski said of his work adapting Weinrauch's memoir that "Anything we left out was omitted for length and to make it a play. These are all her words. My only job here is to be the steward of her story."

What I Knew Beforehand

That it was adapted from a memoir of a Holocaust survivor. I'd also seen and reviewed several other Chain productions over the years.

Thoughts:

A young woman curls up on a clean white bed, wrapped in a blanket and robe, staring away from the audience, out at the peaceful seaside view of her hospital room in Sweden. She has survived years of torment so barbaric she doesn't remember it all at first. She doesn't remember the moment her body was discovered to be alive, rather than one of many corpses found by British soldiers. She doesn't remember being turned out from a German hospital for fear of typhoid. She doesn't remember the journey to Sweden. But the times before that, they start to come back. The sweet and innocent times before, living in Germany with her mother, father, and sister. Her sixteenth birthday, her piano lessons, helping her mother squirrel away jewelry in the event they would need it for bartering. And she remembers when the war started, and what came next. How her parents and sister were rounded up and disappeared, how she was hidden, given false identification papers. How she was recognized and tortured anyway. How she spent three years in three separate concentration camps--Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen--how numerous small kindnesses or sheer luck saved her from sudden death even as she was rescued only twenty-four hours from a slower one.

This is the story she remembers. This is the story she tells.

It's a difficult time, right now, to be Jewish. It's always been a difficult time to be Jewish, if we're being honest. But the voices of antisemitism are getting louder, and hate crimes in America are on the rise. There are still today Holocaust deniers, attempting to shout down the stories told by survivors like Helena (who is still alive at 99), and like a fellow audience member the night I attended. Survivors are old, but they are still here. This atrocity happened in their lifetimes. And it's important that we keep telling these stories, that we not let the atrocities fade into a sepia-toned photograph that is so distant from where we are now. They are not distant. I have noticed, along with the uptick in antisemitic violence, a responding uptick within NYC theater to re-engage in conversations about antisemitism, both past and present. We tell these stories, not just to make sure they are not forgotten or washed over, but to remind ourselves that they could happen again. To declare to each other that we will not let them happen again. 

It's important to tell these stories. However, I worry that this piece of theater, at least as it currently exists, is perhaps not the best vehicle to tell them. In adapter Gostkowski's fidelity to the words of Weinrauch's memoir, the piece is a telling of the many steps in her journey through the war, but it is not quite a play. It is true, but it is not a story with a thesis (perhaps best evidenced by the play's having at least four endings, a bit reminiscent of Lord of the Rings). The unsculpted nature of the script extends as well to David Henderson's set and projection design, which are serviceable but fail to have any transformative moment to reflect the many times Helena's life is turned upside down, is torn apart. I wonder if, in the effort to get out of the way and let Helena's words speak for themselves (an admirable goal), adaptor Gostkowski and director Rick Hamilton have instead gotten in the way of the play itself. The voiceover actors don't sound like they have been directed into the context of their moments, and the overloud and muddy sound quality (Greg Russ) further hinders clarity of the moments Helena is in conversation with others.

This is a shame, because there is good work within this. Actor Masha King, carrying the full two and half hours on her shoulders, has full emotional commitment to the role and obvious affection for, and fidelity to, the woman she inhabits. Outside of King's expressive face, the other heavy lifting being done here is the excellent lighting design by Michael Abrams. Abrams sculpts Helena's story with tight, controlled lighting choices to show her imprisonment, her isolation, her torture, and the sheer exhausting drudgery of surviving with care and specificity. And I think there is a thesis buried in all this. It's in the play's title--A Will To Live--and in Helena's own words, as she asks herself in despair, "Why do I still want to live? Because I am afraid of dying." But this needs to be threaded through the whole, to make the whole thing cohere into one. A piece can hold fidelity to its source without being a direct and unedited quotation.

***

Running: Now playing at Chain Theatre - Opening: August 24, 2023. Closing: September 16, 2023.
Category: one woman play
Length: 2 hours, 30 minutes, including intermission.

Creative Team

Written by: Helena Weinrauch. Adapted for the stage by: Kirk Gostkowski.
Director: Rick Hamilton.
Designers: David Henderson (Set and Projection), Debbi Hobson (Costume), Michael Abrams (Lighting), Greg Russ (Sound), G.D. Kimble (Dramaturgy), Katie Rosin/Kampfire PR (Publicity), Shelby Pickelny (Stage Management), Agnes Scotti (Assistant Stage Manager), Katie Rosin/Kamfire PR (Publicity), Weston Scheck (Production Assistant).
Cast: Masha King, with voice acting by Stephan Goldbach, Anne Kraft, Martin HArris, Josef Urban, Anna Krezel, Tim Andrews, Ida Barklund, Anni Baumann, Deven Anderson.

Masha King as Helena Weinrauch. Photo by David Zayas, Jr.