Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (review)

Holocaust Drama: The Theatre of Atrocity by Gene A. Plunka is the most recent in a series of attempts to find ways of categorizing, analyzing, and assessing theatrical representations of the Shoah. Like many of its predecessors, this work poses intriguing questions regarding theater’s ability to capture the inexplicable and indescribable—genocide—as well as the critic’s ability to assess the varied approaches taken to theatrical depiction of the Holocaust.

The first chapter of Holocaust Drama provides a good summary of the issues surrounding representation in literature and in drama of the genocide. Throughout the rest of the work, Plunka presents clear, in-depth analyses of the plays he discusses as well as excellent general introductions to the Holocaust-related issues that inform those plays. He provides detailed information on the playwright as well as on production histories. Plunka also cites many previous studies and builds on their critical arguments.

The author categorizes plays along fairly traditional lines: the banality of evil, survival of culture during the Holocaust, Marxism and the Holocaust, non-Jews’ culpability, the variety of experiences in the ghettos and concentration camps, the life and memory of survivors, and collective memory of the Shoah. Plunka does provide some unique approaches to analyzing well-known texts, however. In his chapter on the depiction of survivors, Plunka uses Jean-Claude Grumberg’s The Workroom to illustrate the challenges of dramatizing the Holocaust’s impact on survivors’ families. Insightfully, Plunka categorizes some Holocaust dramas as a “literature of the body,” focusing on their dramatists’ portrayal of the ways in which the victims’ bodies were controlled by the Nazis. In this chapter, he provides illuminating analyses of Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? and Michel Vinaver’s Overboard.

Plunka discusses a number of plays that were treated previously by critics such as Robert Skloot, Michael Taub, and Edward Isser; yet he also provides insights into plays that have attracted less critical attention—among them Peter Flannery’s Singer as well as Gilles Segal’s All The Tricks but One and The Puppetmaster of Lodz.

Still, Plunka’s Holocaust Drama, like most earlier critical surveys of theatrical representations of the Shoah, reflects the inherent difficulties scholars face when dealing with this subject matter. As the author notes, many dramas could be categorized as representing the Shoah, and he cannot possibly discuss them all. Plunka does attempt to explain his choices and the difficulty of narrowing the scope of his study; yet, ultimately, he does not give the reader a complete understanding of why he has chosen the plays he discusses.

As an example of his quandary, Plunka argues: “I will examine the most salient plays of the last half of the twentieth century; minor dramas, particularly those that repeat the same motifs of the major plays, must be omitted to avoid repetition and for the sake of some semblance of brevity” (p. 18). Even so, he would have done well to provide a clearer sense of why these plays are the most appropriate to illustrate his arguments and what, in his opinion, defines a “major” Holocaust play as opposed to a “minor” one. What are the bases of this distinction: certain aesthetic qualities? The dramatic strategies employed in representing the Holocaust? An extensive production history? Positive critical reception? The stature of the playwright? A fuller discussion of this question would help the reader to understand Plunka’s selection. This is essential because Plunka limits to no more than three the number of dramas he uses to illustrate each of his categories; and, in a few chapters, he discusses only one or two texts.

In addition, Plunka is not always clear as to why certain types of work are excluded. He states in his introduction: “Other plays that concentrate on the aftereffects of the war . . . are also outside the scope of this study, even when the aftereffects tangentially involve guilt about one’s actions toward Jews during the war” (p. 18). Yet...