Heavenly Thoughts (Notes—and SPOILERS—from “Way to Heaven”)

Thanks

In what has quickly become a tradition for me, I’m counting the number of Thank Yous a producer includes in the program, and trying to figure out just why the producer felt compelled to thank these people. In this program, there are 28 Thank Yous.

• “the cast, designers and crew for their talent and generosity”, which, when translated, means They’re Not Getting Paid.
• one of the actresses’ Moms
• two theatre companies
• five Spanish cultural entities, including one website
• Special Thanks to tdf Costume Collection, your one-stop shop for the next time Prince Harry comes over to play dress-up.
• most interesting of all, thanks go to someone “incredible”. Hmmm… how does one go about impressing a producer as ‘incredible’…?

The Commandant’s Guide to Directing Non-Cooperative Theatre

If the whole world’s a stage, the Nazis excelled at Absurdist Theatre. This particular Nazi stage is a ‘show camp’, where the visitor is encouraged to take all the photos he wants. And what’s a theatre company without an Artistic Director, a forward-thinking visionary.

You can think of the Commandant as a nearly insane, micro-managing AD. That is to say, a typical AD. His first big task was in having his director, Gershom Gottfried, cut the cast down to 100. For those let go, this was the most unkindest cut of all.

For the Nazi’s concept of theatre, the Commandant was the ideal artistic director. Just look at some of the principles he instilled into Gottfried:

“Look inside your life to give the lines”.

The Commandant knows that the most effective liars actors are those who draw from their own experience.

And for those who don’t have the life experience to draw from, the Commandant teaches his actors The Method:

“Smile…and you end up happy.”

Considering the context in which this was said, this line is likely the most chilling one in the play.

Ask any experimental director why he’s setting Shakespeare in the Okefenokee Swamp, and he’ll tell you the same thing the Commandant told Gottfried:

“The same story can be told a number of ways”

The Commandant, who seems to have spent time in New York studying theatre, knew how to focus and motivate his actors. In a cruel variation on an old joke (“What’s my motivation?” “Your paycheck.”), the Commandant repeatedly reminds Gottfried to focus his cast with this motivation:

“As long as you’re here, you are not on that train.”

Finally, though the entire performance is plotted in greatest detail, the Commandant wants to keep the actors from thinking too much. Though the principle was unspoken, it’s obvious he was teaching the KISS system:

Keep it simple, schweinehund.

Marketing

Nazis!

It was a great marketing move to put a Nazi on the poster, along with what could be Anne Frank’s little sister. Nothing like having pro- and an- so starkly drawn so you can easily tell the –tagonists without a scorecard.

Also, the producers smartly provided a means to give feedback through an insert in the program. I take it as further proof that this play has a foreign pedigree, as American productions are never eager to hear back from their audiences.

Venue

Teatro Circulo is one of a series of postage stamp theatres intertwined with tight and tiny storefronts in the Neutral Zone between The Village and The East Village. The theatres are little more than glorified rehearsal spaces, made from castoff warehouses.

The feeling in the air was like a community theatre that had come to the big city, complete with bandanna-bedecked stage manager and bathrooms shared with the cast. In contrast, the crowd was touristy and eager to get back to their slivered hotels overlooking Madison Square Park.

Collaborators

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely audience….

The most insidious thing about Way to Heaven was in how it turned all of us in the audience into Collaborators.

The Commandant was a well-read intellectual with theatre training. In Nazi Germany, that kind of person could have been labeled an Intellectual or Homosexual.

But this Commandant made a deal with a Devil, to serve Him in exchange for his life and for the freedom to continue reading the classics. This Collaboration made him particularly effective, evil dressed in a veneer of culture.

The Commandant wasn’t speaking to the Red Cross worker, but to us when he was acknowledging our good intentions: “You heard monstrous rumors. …It’s your good will that brings you here.”

He subtly brings us into his world when he says of the Jews, that “they paint themselves as victims.” We find ourselves weakly accepting this lie, because it’s so easy to excuse our own passivity by blaming others for their passivity.

But there was one moment, and one moment only, when Gottfried spoke the unspeakable: “What if we refuse?”

The answer was instantly obvious to anyone who was chilled by the ambiguous ending to the 1975 spy thriller, Three Days of the Condor.

When the hunted ex-CIA man played by Robert Redford turns over incriminating papers to the New York Times, his handler calmly tells him, “What if they don’t print it?” If the allegations are not made public, Redford’s character risked his life for nothing.

In the same vein, the Commandant replies to the ‘Mayor’, with no threat of recrimination, “What if the man didn’t understand your gesture?”, what if he doesn’t include it in his report?

Nothing is more disheartening that the thought that a sacrifice will be an empty gesture. So, the Commandant convinces Gottfried that he had nothing to gain.

But Gottfried never considered that he had nothing to lose. Gottfried’s passive acceptance of the Commandant’s claim, made him a collaborator, too, in the fate of the Jews.

The Red Cross rep became a willing tool, because he was unwilling to challenge what he saw. He merely observed. The Commandant plays the audience, too, in the same way.

Audience members are by trained to be passive observers of life, watching but not getting involved. We don’t even clap at the end of a play, even when it’s obviously over. We cower quietly in the dark, waiting for someone else to begin clapping.

We, the audience, were taken in by the Commandant, to the point where I began to feel like I, too, was a collaborator in the cover-up. When he tells us, “Close your eyes,” I was there, too, and I was made dirty. I, too, was a collaborator.

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