Kindertransport problematic

The issue of how to adequately represent the Holocaust is a difficult one. The sheer body of Holocaust art and literature is staggering. However, value judgments rarely come into play about these works. It is hard to be objective in a critique of any art dealing with a subject of such magnitude, and there is a real reluctance on the part of most to criticize anything which addresses Holocaust issues. This is a dangerous stance, though. One must represent this subject respectfully and seriously, yes, but art should not just be about its philosophical value. It should be held up to certain standards.

That having been said, Kindertransport, the play by Diane Samuels, is not a very good play. It has its strengths to be sure, but as a text it falls short in and of itself. And in terms of the way the text handles the issue of the Holocaust, it is significantly lacking. "Kinder-transport" is the Theater and Dance Department's 1998 fall production, and try though they might, the cast and crew cannot quite salvage this play.

The play, under the direction of Associate Professor of Theater Jane Armitage, focuses on the life of young Eva. Eva, played by senior Amy Gunzenhauser, is a German Jew sent by her mother to England, one of the nations offering amnesty to the children of oppressed people in pre-war Europe. This is the kindertransport of the title, an underground railroad of sorts. In England, Eva is taken in by Lil (junior Rachel Roberts) and her family.

The action of the play takes place in the home of Evelyn (junior Lydia Steier) who was once Eva. Evelyn has become entirely assimilated into English society. She is now a middle-aged English woman with a daughter of her own, Faith (first-year Jennifer Dominguez). Faith, her mother and Lil, who has come to be mother and grandmother to these women, form the present reality of the play.

In the past are young Eva, her mother Helga (sophomore Daniéle Martin), and Lil, who is the only actor to move back and forth between the present and the past. Sophomore Patrick Mulryan rounds out the ensemble, taking on a number of different roles from the actual postman to the imagined terror of the rat catcher, a figure from a children's story who appears more than once.

The device of shifting between past and present, the real and the imagined, is rather well reproduced on-stage. Only Lil is required to shift from one time to the other. However, the past and the present share the stage-we can see young Eva and her mother and also Evelyn and her daughter, all in the same ambiguous physical space. This affords the play a nice fluidity, yet understandably trips up the actors.

Armitage opted to have the actors speak in accents, which is one of the primary problems. It is difficult to affect a German accent, especially while someone is affecting an English accent right next to you. The accents are confusing and unstable, and not at all effective. Steier, as Evelyn, and Dominguez as her daughter are the most successful in their attempts, and the other English accents are passable. The attempts at German accents fail, and what is worse, are distracting and confusing. In her first few scenes, Gunzenhauser is nearly unintelligible. When she is actually speaking German, which she does at a few key moments, the effect is lost, since the audience is still trying to decipher what she's saying.

Perhaps the oddity of the German accents is what makes the scenes set in England, between the grown Evelyn and her family, far more effective. Steier, as Evelyn, is quite convincing. Her posture and carriage are nice touches which add polish to her performance. In a program note, Steier writes of her grandfather, the son of Holocaust victims. "It is his faraway gazes, reluctant recountings, and steadfast silence that served as my inspiration in preparing this role," she writes. Indeed, these qualities are mainstays of her interpretation of the role, and are well done. She appears to have put a lot of thought into her performance, and hers is one of the more successful.

Dominguez, as Evelyn's daughter Faith, also has a strong showing. She had a great deal to work with, exploring the complex relationship between the mother and daughter, and her interpretation unfortunately does not do justice to the text. The emotional fights with her mother feel contrived, and Faith comes across as more of a bratty child than it seems Samuels intended her to be. But Dominguez remained the most focused character, albeit focused perhaps on the wrong aspects of her role. She never broke character, an impressive achievement for an actress sharing a stage with so many other well drawn characters.

As Lil, Roberts had perhaps the hardest job. She had to jump from being grandmother to being mother, basically going from thirty to sixty years old in seconds. She was far more convincing as a grandmother. The chemistry between she and Steier was strong; the chemistry between Roberts and Gunzenhauser was virtually non-existent. Lil's credibility rests on her ability to convey warmth and love between herself and the young Eva. This simply did not happen.

Gunzenhauser, as Eva, had a number of difficulties. Her portrayal of the nine year-old girl tended toward the cloying and sentimental. The scenes between Eva and her biological mother, Helga, were hollow. There seemed to be no feeling at all toward her mother. Eva's eventual renunciation of her birth mother is the main plot twist in the text, and in order to be at all effective one must be able to see genuine love between the child and the mother. Since the audience can never believe that Eva and her mother were close, when Eva renounces Helga, it is very hard to care too much.

To portray the teenage Eva, Gunzenhauser became icy and cold, the opposite of her portrayal of the young girl. This is less than effective. If the audience didn't like her before, they certainly care less now. This is one of the major flaws in the production. Steier must be believable as an older version of Gunzenhauser, but it's nearly impossible to reconcile their disparate performances.

Martin, as Helga, makes a valiant effort as the mother of young Eva. Their scenes together, however, seem devoid of the emotion the audience is meant to find overpowering. Mulryan, in his myriad roles, does a nice job of providing comic relief or a lighthearted moment. As the shadowy rat catcher figure, very little seems to be required of him, which is a shame. He is literally just a shadow to which the actors react. And as a sadistic German soldier he is, unfortunately, entirely unbelievable, a ghastly, almost comic, interpretation of the stock, evil Nazi.

The staging of the show is unique in that the action all unfolds far downstage. The lovely, constructivist backdrop, designed by Michael Grube, is an effective physical space in which to represent the ambiguous territory of memory. The straight-forward lighting design is unobtrusive, yet manages to steal the show in the rat catcher's scenes.

But the production cannot hold up to the scrutiny which must logically follow such intimate staging. Armitage clearly should have worked harder on handling the transitions made between the worlds of this play. Instead, there is a great deal of focus on technical touches like sound effects, which are frankly more jarring than anything.

It's interesting to note that four actual kindertransport children were consulted by the production. One was present at last nights final dress rehearsal, upon which this review is based. One wonders what they think of this play as a text, whether it adequately addresses the relevant issues.

There is little emotional thrust at the play's close. Intellectually, the audience understands that a great deal has unfolded before their eyes. However, the proliferation of Holocaust art has made most audiences numb to the larger picture. This is a sad state. After seeing this play, one cares far more about the middle-aged Evelyn and her relationships with her mother and her daughter. The child Eva and all that unfolded in the past seem unrelated, even uninteresting. The play, therefore, is unsuccessful in its mission-it is called "Kinder-transport," but by the end of the evening, it is hard to see why.

Kindertransport is playing tonight and Saturday night at 8 p.m. in Hall Auditorium, and at 1 p.m. on Sunday, October 11.

Two Faces of Eva: Eva, Amy Gunzenhauser, and her adult self, Lydia Steier, in rehearsals of Kindertransport (photo by John Seyfried)