"LEMKIN’S HOUSE" AT 6TH@PENN THEATRE
SanDiego.com, CA
May 31 2007
The 6th@Penn Theatre is wrestling with an enterprise of overwhelming
ambition – a months-long menu of 26 plays, including several premieres
of local works, united as the Resilience of the Spirit Human Rights
Festival.
Before saying anything else, I salute this hard-working troupe,
and especially Executive Producer Dale Morris, for the passion and
the dedicated sincerity of their effort. Such virtues are always in
short supply.
Sadly, even the best of intentions usually can’t make up for lack of
assets essential to success.
Consider one of the productions presently on display, Catherine
Filloux’s "Lemkin’s House."
Its subject – genocide – is somber and urgent. Its technique – a
montage of frustration in the afterlife – has possibilities for a
plangent mixture of realism and abstract imagination. Its fragments
of history are arresting, its confrontational attitude is hard to
brush aside.
Yet there is about the play a musty, befuddled and defeated air. It
laments the reality that such a horrific subject is so universally
ignored, but it offers no gripping theory as to why this is so.
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish Jew, born in 1900, with a respected
career in international law when World War II began. He was wounded
in the Polish Army and eventually escaped the Nazis to settle in
the U.S. where he became an early outspoken denouncer of the German
holocaust, which wiped out most of his immediate family.
It was Lemkin, a consultant at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders,
who coined the word "genocide" and he it was who would serve as the
world’s conscience on the subject, endlessly badgering the United
Nations and the U.S. government to make genocide a crime.
Though he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven years during
the 1950s, he never won. And, when he died of a heart attack in 1959,
it still would be another 19 years before the U.S. became the 98th
country to ratify the U.N.’s anti-genocide convention.
Filloux’s play introduces Lemkin just as he dies. The 90-minute traffic
on the tiny stage is all in a purgatory-like room through which pass
Lemkin’s mother, Wisconsin Senator Proxmire, various pathetic victims,
loathsome thugs, shrugging bureaucrats and well-meaning do-gooders
offering fragmented commentary on(and assorted demonstrations of)
genocidal shame from the American Indians through Armenians, Jews,
Cambodians, Kurds, Rwandans, Bosnians and Liberians to (check the
headlines) the outrages of Darfur.
"When I was alive," laments Lemkin’s Shade, "I was haunted by the
dead. Now I’m dead and haunted by the living."
But, dead, he comes up with no more answers than he did while alive.
Maybe fewer. Because, the author seems to say, there just don’t seem
to BE any answers. Horror and workaday tedium co-exist while millions
die but billions don’t seem to notice. The more things change, the
more they stay the same.
Walter Ritter plays Lemkin with a sweetness of spirit but probably
less focus and more fecklessness than the original displayed in a
formidable career. Duane Weekly brings heft to other senior male
roles, Connie DiCrazia does well as lost women and Monique Gaffney
and Anthony Hamm supply skilled support.
Henia Belalia’s staging would benefit from a general tightening
and quickened pace but she faces an impossible task in keeping the
visual and literary aspects balanced with such primitive technical
resources. Maybe something less literal would work better. Maybe not.
It’s an overly complicated construct.
But it’s a subject so simple, so basic and so evil that it deserves
whatever attention can be directed at it.
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