The Theatre of the Holocaust, Volume 1: Four Plays

THRONE OF STRAW

Harold and Edith Lieberman zyxwvutsrqponmlk THRONE OF STRAW dedicated to the memory of Edith Lieberman, died March 7, 1975 We should like to thank the following for helping the play along the way: Mel Helstein, Donald Freed, Dorothy Sinclair, Bob Skloot, Halina Charwat, Carl Lieberman, Lillian Hara. Special thanks to Abbey Fraser for writing the original music. Thanks to Ellen Schiff for her article about Holocaust playwrights in thezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYX New York Times, Dec. 2, 1979. 114 A Note on Historical Accuracy zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfed Throne of Straw is a play, not a work of history. We have made every effort to remain true to the major events and characters of the Lodz ghetto during the years of the Holocaust. Rumkowski, Greiser, and Biebow actually lived. Rabinowitz, the police chief, is a distillation of the men who held that office at various times. Rumkowski's wife was named Dora, but her character is our own invention. The other characters in this drama are entirely our creation , based on the interviews we did with Lodz survivors. The choices of action, scene, and time frame were made to serve the stage and not historical scholarship, although there are several excellent books available on the subject of the Lodz ghetto. To cite only two obvious changes: Biebow did not assume his post until the creation of the ghetto; and the gypsies were moved into the Balut (the ghetto area of the city) at a later time. Therefore, we ask your indulgence in viewing this drama as both factual and an act of imagination. Our aim was not to judge—but to reveal—so that you might form your own judgments. 115 Production Notes zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXW Throne of Straw is both Epic and folkloric in its form and substance . It is Epic in that the play is episodic with narrative bridges, which seems the best way to cover historical time as it moves through the action for a particular kind of audience catharsis. Epic should not be equated with cold. Sartre pointed the way when he wrote: "Anti-emotionalism is not what Brecht wanted. All he wanted was for the spectator's emotion not to be blind. The ideal would be to 'show' and 'move' at the same time. I don't think Brecht considered that contradiction as an insoluble absurdity." The director must try to fuse both aspects. It is folkloric because Jewish folklore is a collective social and psychological outlook that accumulated through the many years of living in the Diaspora. The noted historian Solomon F. Bloom writing about the "ghetto dictator" described him in exactly the terms in which we see our protagonist, Rumkowski: "[He] may turn out to reflect one or another popular and conventional attitude. He may derive his ideas from folklore rather than the more self-conscious and sophisticated culture. His significance may thus be broadened. The notion that the Jews are a clever people; the circumstance that, being an unclerical people, every man is potentially a priest and a leader, and that Everyman may assume the mantle of social protector and even of a sort of prophet—the sense, in short, of mission; the hope or conviction that the Jews are an indestructible and eternal people, that The Lord will leave a remnant'—all of these, and other such, turn up in the thinking and self-justification of the dictator; and they are not individual discoveries or inventions ." Any work on the Holocaust is bound to produce emotion, but care must be taken to avoid any sentimentality. This is especially 117 118 THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST true during thosezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB moments of moral choice in the play, of which each character has at least one. The mise-en-scene is best done simply; this is a "poor" play. The poems of Yankele may be set to music, sung simply on their own, or done with his own accompaniment on a kind of crank-up hand organ he would carry on the street, or even a harmonica. However achieved, the music should avoid schmaltzy Jewish melodies. Kurt Weill will not help either, since he wrote for a different milieu. There is a complete musical score by Abbey Fraser, which may be used, subject to the composer's permission. Slides may or may not be used depending on the aims of each particular production. A full set may be obtained from the author for a copying fee. CAST OF CHARACTERS In Order...