The Weight of History: Max Frisch's Andorra

While it has never proved very successful in America—its first New York production in 1963 was a complete flop—Max Frisch's Andorra has had no shortage of European admirers. The London premiere was a critical triumph, with Kenneth Tynan embracing it as "a near masterpiece," and the Times dubbing it "one of the great plays of post-war theatre." After initial storms of controversy in the German-speaking world, it moved from theaters into classrooms, where it now occupies a stature roughly equivalent to Death of a Salesman in the American canon. In light of the fact that a professional production of Andorra has not been attempted in New York for nearly four decades, the play would seem ripe for renewal.

Theatre for a New Audience assembled an impressive production team to do just that. The work was staged at the Lucille Lortel Theatre by Liviu Ciulei, working from a new translation of the play by Village Voice critic Michael Feingold, who previously translated Frisch's The Firebugs. The cast includes notable Broadway hands Bill Buell (the Innkeeper), Laurie Kennedy (the Mother), and Nicholas Kepros (the Priest). Such a pool of talent, however, could not make up for the fact that Frisch's best-known play is also his creakiest and preachiest. If the work seemed heavy-handed to its first New York audiences, it has improved little with age.

The setting is Andorra, a small, mountainous state that, Frisch writes, "has nothing to do with the real small state of that name, nor does it stand for another real small state." The latter part of Frisch's disavowal is more difficult to swallow than the former, for the playwright's native Switzerland is clearly a referent here. Andorra, we learn, is a proud, peaceful nation threatened with invasion by the neighboring "Blacks" (Blackshirts, in Feingold's translation), and the shadow of war has raised tensions within the Andorran town. The town's citizens are broad caricatures of Swiss Bürgers and their families, well-meaning, conservative souls whose volk-iness is equal parts patriotic nostalgia and anti-Semitic bigotry. Standing somewhat outside the community is Andri, an adopted youth whom the citizens believe to be Jewish and who becomes the central target of their subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Semitism. The greater part of the drama involves the systematic oppression and torture of Andri for his perceived Jewishness, an oppression that becomes increasingly vicious as the threat of invasion by the Blackshirts heightens. When the Andorrans finally learn that Andri is not Jewish after all, they refuse to accept the revelation and instead intensify their treatment of him as a communal scapegoat.

The trouble with Andorra is not its message but the fact that it is so easily reducible to a message; it slips all too quickly from satire to mere moralizing. The biting humor and counterintuitive revelations of, say, Frisch's far more nuanced postwar allegory The Firebugs [Biedermann und die Brandstifter] are largely absent from Andorra. This absence was not necessarily a failure on Frisch's part; there is a time and a place, after all, for the bully pulpit. Performing Andorra in Switzerland and Germany in the early 1960s was a decidedly risky business. The Swiss generally read the play as referring to the Germans, while the Germans generally read it as referring to the Swiss. On occasions when audience members understood the play as referring to themselves, they frequently criticized it for simplifying the complex situation of Jews and Germans during the Third Reich. In such an atmosphere of disavowal and denial, the transparency of Frisch's allegory may have been a virtue, its unambiguous message a strength. Performing a play like this before a group of contemporary New York theatergoers, on the other hand, felt like performing Marry No Man if He Drinks to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The pleasures of the play were largely of the tongue-clicking, hiss-the-villain...