Theatre in Review: Eavesdropping on History (Barefoot Theatre at Cherry Lane Studio)

The horror of the Holocaust reaches across three generations in Eavesdropping on History. Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg is a psychoanalyst and first-time playwright, and her drama -- about a survivor of Auschwitz and the Lodz Ghetto, whose closely held secrets have a devastating effect on her daughter and granddaughter -- is complex enough to stymie the efforts of far more experienced hands. The net effect of this production is to suggest that Bekerman-Greenberg has the basis for a really gripping prose piece on her hands.

Rosa, an elderly Jewish woman living in New York in 2004, is startled by the appearance of her granddaughter, Shaina, who all but disappeared while on a trip to Poland. Shaina, a medical student on the lam from her studies, has spent her time off the family grid retracing Rosa's history. (Rosa, a skilled hat maker, occupied a fairly privileged position in the closed-world of the Lodz Ghetto, a fact that she refuses to discuss.) This is an open rebellion against her mother, Renee, a physician. It's easy to see why; Renee, thanks to her upbringing by Rosa, is emotionally frigid, with no interest in the past. (She conceived Shaina during an affair with a married WASP colleague; Shaina has never met her father.) Each woman forms one side of a triangle that has left them all but strangled, unable to lead productive lives.

Indeed, by hiding the horrific details of her past, Rosa's memories have affected Shaina and Renee like a virus. Shaina, afflicted by feelings of alienation and questions of identity, is making a life's work out of unearthing her family's history, sacrificing a romantic relationship and a potential career in the effort. Renee, who lives for her work, is tormented by nightmares in which she is her mother, facing horrible, Sophie's Choice-like decisions; for psychic relief, she seeks out anonymous sex partners who will take part with her in Nazi humiliation fantasies.

That's quite a load of material, and Bekerman-Greenberg, who was born in an Italian displaced persons camp after World War II, clearly knows whereof she speaks. But her tyro status as a writer is painfully evident throughout. Such a drama calls for complex, shaded characterizations, but the author gives us two-dimensional people who, using the language of therapy, diagnose each other with a facility that is the enemy of drama. "I feel like I'm tangled in some kind of spider web. Sometimes it feels like it's strangling me," says Shaina, introducing one of the play's main tropes. Later, like a good analysand, she says, "You never found love, Mom; how can you help me? What can you teach me about love?" Renee says to Rosa, "You and I have been living in your story -- eating, drinking, breathing your story. Do you want [Shaina] to get caught the way I did in your spider web?" (That web again -- it has an objective correlative in the story.) Later, condemning her mother and daughter for discussing the past, Renee shouts, "The two of you are back on the road to doom and gloom."

Further complicating matters are the appearances of Rosa's long-dead brother Yakov, who represents the memories of the past that ultimately won't be silenced; as Yakov, Mike Shapiro delivers the facts of life in the ghetto in chilling fashion, but every time he enters, the others on stage are forced to freeze awkwardly in mid-conversation. At other times, the characters see him and engage him in conversation.

The cast struggles with this material, with varying degrees of success. Lynn Cohen imbues Rosa with welcome dollops of warmth while never letting us forget how terribly the past haunts her. But Shaina, a young woman with a very real grievance, comes off too often as whiny and self-involved, traits that Aidan Koehler's performance only accentuates. Stephanie Roth Haberle, a formidable actress in any situation, is lumbered by Renee, who alternates between icy professionalism and floods of tears; she seems notably uncomfortable in the two poorly written scenes showing her seek erotic satisfaction through domination role-play. Later, when the grisly details of Rosa's past are laid bare, the director, Ronald Cohen, ups the ante, encouraging all three ladies to overemote, a strategy that undermines the very powerful story Bekerman-Greenberg has to tell.

And, indeed, it is an important story. The toxic effect of the Holocaust on the children of its survivors is a topic that hasn't been explored very much in the theatre; the great play on this theme waits to be written. I don't want to dismiss the author's effort; she clearly has firsthand knowledge of the subject, and has thought long and hard about it. But the Holocaust is a uniquely difficult and important event to write about -- one might say it is sacred -- and one must approach it with both humility and all the skill one can muster. If not, one runs the risk of trivializing it, or worse, making it easy to dismiss. These are charges that Eavesdropping on Dreams cannot fully escape.

In any case, the Barefoot Theatre Company provides a set of solid production values. Niluka Hotaling's setting -- which has to cover many locations -- places the action inside what looks like the kind of railroad car in which Rosa would have been carried to Auschwitz; embedded in the wall's wooden slats are images of what appear to be images of the Lodz Ghetto. Eric Nightengale's lighting moves gracefully and fluidly from place to place and between past and present. Victoria Malvagno's costumes are appropriate to the characters. Adam Stone's sound design is generally well-done, but I regret the horror-movie music that accompanies the scenes of Rosa's past.

Then again, that's the problem with Eavesdropping on Dreams; it overdramatizes facts so horrific that a more unadorned presentation would be bone-chilling enough. Bekerman-Greenberg might try telling her story in prose, without adjectives or editorializing. It might prove to be bombshell.--David Barbour