`Ghetto' poses painful ethical quandaries

Theater review

"Ghetto" by Joshua Sobol. Directed by Lauren Marshall. Produced by Seattle Public Theater. Thursday-Sunday through Nov. 12 at Bathhouse Theatre, 7312 W. Green Lake Drive N., Seattle. $10-$19. 206-324-6500.

In 1942, in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania, an astonishing thing transpired: A theater was founded on the site where 50,000 of Vilna's 70,000 Jews were murdered by Nazi decree two months earlier.

In the shadow of that massacre, an intrepid troupe performed plays, concerts, even biting political satire to both their fellow Jews and German officers. As they literally sang for their lives, the Nazis deported a stream of Vilna's Jews to the deadly Polnar concentration camp - until the bloody day in 1943 when they "liquidated" the ghetto altogether.

How can art survive in such a chamber of horrors? And why should it? To distract and soothe those doomed to genocide? As a defiant gesture in the face of oppression? Or, under duress, to help the Nazis maintain calm as they exacted their "final solution?"

In his remarkable 1984 docu-drama "Ghetto," Israeli dramatist Joshua Sobol also plies us with spirited humor and music - while making us sort through an agonizing tangle of ethical quandaries.

Sobol's demanding, rewarding, well-traveled Hebrew-language work is now getting an overdue local premiere from Seattle Public Theater, in an English adaptation by Jack Viertel. SPT earns big points for chutzpah: The play's neo-Brechtian blend of dialectical rigor and emotional immediacy, biting comedy and stark tragedy would stretch any American ensemble. And as SPT's first mainstage offering at its new home on Green Lake, "Ghetto" seems an admirable but fairly impractical choice.

The large cast crowds the small Bathhouse Theatre stage to the point of not allowing for the towering pile of clothes that's usually the visual centerpiece of "Ghetto." And in Lauren Marshall's forthright, sometimes plodding staging on Nathan Rodda's tri-level but very cramped set, the semi-professional cast barely drills beyond the script's didactic surface to the layers of irony and surrealism underneath.

But at least Marshall and company impart the fascinating saga Sobel reconstructs clearly and unmawkishly, with enriching bursts of soulful klezmer music. And they lay the ferocious moral dilemmas of the reality-based characters right in your lap.

The most controversial figure here is Jakob Gens (David S. Klein), the Nazi-appointed leader of the Vilna Ghetto who instituted the theater as one of many stratagems to appease the Germans and save Jewish lives. But the devil Gens serves, exemplified by the brutal, music-loving SS officer Kittel (Bob DeDea), is rapacious. And in a harrowing barter session, Gens trades old, infirm Jewish lives for young and hale ones, then defends the deal with a grotesque logic that's both hard to dispute, and impossible to condone.

While Gens tries to salvage "Jewish blood, not Jewish honor," the factory manager Weiskopf (Gene Freedman) cozies up to the Nazis for profit. And what of the ghetto actors, led by the wan, lovely chanteuse Chaya (touchingly portrayed by Julie Thornton) and Srulik (Michael Denini, who speaks truth to power via his ventriloquist's dummy, played by Shana Bestock)?

Struggling to bring joy to their community, these thespians also face an artist's worst nightmare: also amuse your oppressors, or die. In an unsubtle but stunning metaphor of humiliation, that even means singing "Swanee" in blackface at Nazi behest.

The play also sets up an intriguing counterpoint between ghetto librarian Kruk (Meg Savlov) and Dr. Paul (DeDea), a German scholar doing research for a Jewish museum planned by the Nazis.

The Nazis' attraction to and fetishization of the Jewish culture they were viciously annihilating is a frequent, discomfiting motif of Holocaust literature. Though DeDea's Kittel too often settles into stock Nazi villainy, complete with maniacal laugh, his flirtation with Thornton's terrified Chaya is a potent glimpse into the contorted heart of fascist darkness. And it's one of the sharper aspects of this earnest, unrealized version of a bracing classic of Holocaust drama.