SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin Part Three: Origins, Chapter Two.

Producer Virginia Criste commissioned me to write the libretto for Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin in 2000.

At the time, my wife was pregnant. I had a production of Eliot Ness In Cleveland coming up at the Cleveland Playhouse, directed by David Esbjornson, and, immediately after, a production of Flight of the Lawnchair Man coming up at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia, directed by Hal Prince. Meanwhile, the election of 2000, with all the ensuing recounts and hanging chads, went on.

It was a busy year. The research was daunting. I had stacks and stacks of books to read, videos to view, music to listen to (in a future blog entry I'll post a partial bibliography). And it was rough stuff. I was researching a ghetto (Theresienstadt, or Terezin) where the Nazis sent entire families, told them to create art, music and theatre for propaganda purposes, then sent them away to die in Auschwitz. The most powerful material for me was the artwork that survived, depicting life in Terezin in all its misery, but also in all its complexity, including, sometimes, joy. In particular, Bedrich Fritta's drawings to his son Tommy for his third birthday, were extraordinarily moving to me. At that time, I could only see them in a video, Terezin Diary.

I remember the project started to take shape for me over a long Thanksgiving weekend. My wife Michele and I were visiting her family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Our return to New York was delayed by a massive snow storm. I hunkered down with some books and by the time the snow was cleared, I began to see how I might craft a libretto from this material.

I chose not to tell the story of any one historical personage. It felt wrong to do that, like stealing someone's life. But real people and real stories were the foundation of the libretto, in a fictionalized and theatricalized form.

I was planning on finishing the first draft in early February, 2001. But my son Alexander was born about a week earlier than his official due date. This threw off my schedule. I had everything worked out almost to the minute. But life, as always, had plans of its own.

About six weeks later, I emerged from my new father haze, and finished the libretto. Virginia expressed her enthusiasm for my efforts, and we set about finding a composer and a lyricist. At one point, I thought I might try to write the lyrics myself, but after making an effort to do so, I decided I much preferred to hoist that responsibility onto someone else.

First, Joel Derfner came on board as composer. Not long after, Joel and I met with Len Schiff. I remember after the meeting turning to Joel and saying, "you realize he's much smarter than either one of us." Joel agreed he was, and Len became our lyricist.

We spent the next several years writing, rewriting, reading, and workshopping the show. My second son Caleb was born during this period, and my wife and I became homeowners, moving to the Hudson Valley. Len and his wife, Jen, also had a son, Adam, and they also bought their own home. Joel published two books, Gay Haiku, and Swish, and he and his partner Mike also bought a house, in Brooklyn. We were all making a transition into adulthood and responsibility, while dealing with this most sobering subject matter, but also trying to maintain the childlike joy that brought us to the theatre in the first place.

Also during this period, we traveled to Prague and Terezin. This was an extraordinarily moving experience. We spoke to survivors of Terezin, walked the town, and saw a secret room in a now private home that the inmates of Terezin had painted with Jewish iconography so that the room might serve as a makeshift synagogue. Our terrific tour guide, Petra, grew up only a few miles from Terezin, but told us she never knew a thing about the place until after the Communist regime collapsed.

We learned so many stunning pieces of information that later came to inform our show or were incorporated into it. That secret room is referenced. So are the very useful presents that young boys would give to girls they liked.

One survivor told us about standing on a street corner in Prague after the war, and wondering how to go on, having lost her entire family and all of her friends. Our heroine, Lorelei, asks herself the same question at the end of Signs of Life.

In Prague, I finally was able to locate a book of Bedrich Fritta's drawing for his son Tommy. It was published as This is Not a Fairy Tale - it's Real. To Tommy for his third Birthday in Terezin, 22 January 1944. You can't find it on Amazon, but you can order it from the Jewish Museum of Prague. The version I've got has a "fairy tale" written to go alongside the original pictures and text. This "fairy tale" is not nearly as powerful as the original book Fritta wrote for his son. The book in something closer to its original form can be ordered from Yad Vashem.

Fritta hid the original manuscript behind a wall in Terezin. It was recovered after the war. There are many such stories about artwork in Terezin. In some cases, the art was recovered decades later. The secreting of drawings and their post-war recovery also plays a crucial role in our musical.

Fritta died in Auschwitz. His wife died in Terezin. Tommy, only four years old, spent months in the Little Fortress, the horrible prison the Nazis kept outside Terezin. Miraculously, he survived.

I remember crying my eyes out in a motel room outside Terezin as I poured through the pages of this book. Tommy Fritta, as drawn by his father, looks so much like my young son Alexander in some of the pictures. Alexander was himself not quite two at the time I sat in that motel room looking at those pictures. The thought of what Tommy had to endure, and the terror I felt knowing that in another place, in another time, my own Alexander could have been subjected to the same, was too much to bear. It's too much to bear even now. I'm not ashamed to admit that as I write these words, I can barely make out my computer screen through my tears.

Now, with Jeremy Dobrish directing, Signs of Life is set for an off-Broadway run in February and March, 2010.

It's been a long emotional journey. And it's been worth it, every step along the way.

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Why Are There No Great Hanukkah Songs?

Some of the best Christmas songs were written by Jews ("White Christmas," "The Christmas Song," "I'll Be Home For Christmas," "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays," "Rudolph The Red-Nose Reindeer," "Silver Bells," "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!").

So, why are there no great Hanukkah songs?

There's a few funny ones (Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song"), and a few lame ones ("The Dreidel Song"), but nothing like the list above of great American popular songs. One could suppose that during the era those songs were written, a Hanukkah song might not have been viewed as a highly commercial prospect.

So, maybe it's time to correct that.

My challenge to composers Jewish and gentile (only fair): write a great Hanukkah song in the tradition of the great holidays songs above. Nothing "ironic" or glib. Remember, you've got great material to work with: war, liberation, religious freedom, the victory of the underdog, miracles, family, and, especially, presents.

The Past Really is a Foreign Country.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." L.P Hartley, The Go-Between.

So, it turns out the past really is a foreign country.

I wasn't at all surprised that I'd have a lot of research to do in writing the libretto for SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin, which takes place in Czechoslovakia during World War Two. But it's amazing how many little things come up that require tracking down.

Here's a few:

When did the terms "Molotov Cocktail," "canoodle," and "throttle" come into being? (1940, 1859, and sometime in the 15th century, it turns out.)

And guess what? Writing about the recent past can be just as tricky.

While I don't consider myself a "political" writer, political issues and current events intrude into my plays a lot, since it's only natural that such events would be on the minds of characters living through them. I've discovered that with some of my "contemporary" plays, this requires either constant updating, which is a huge pain, or a certain vagueness, which is . . . well, vague. Perhaps as a result of this frustration, I was recently inspired to try to address the recent past in my plays. This allows me to delve into contemporary life and issues, but in a specific historical context that doesn't require constant updating.

Sounds easy, right? Not so much, it turns out.

When not working on SIGNS OF LIFE, I've been working a cycle of (I think) five plays, that take place from the election of 2000 through the election of 2008. One would think I'd remember details about this period, during which I was an adult who paid pretty close attention to the world around me.

But it's amazing how quickly details escape the memory. For example, I remember using a cell phone in the year 2000. But did cellphones have built-in speaker phones at that time? I don't think mine did, and I'm having a hard time finding out if any did. Even Wikipedia didn't help.

Another example: a character of mine made a disparaging remark about Facebook in a play that takes place in 2003. Yeah, you guessed it: there was no Facebook in 2003. So, now the character makes no such remark.

When Shaw wrote Arms and the Man in 1894, did he have this kind of trouble writing about events that took place less than a decade earlier? Or is the fast pace of technological change in the internet age the cause of my vexation?

Now, one might ask: do any of these details really matter? Is Julius Caesar any less of a play because one of the characters mentions a clock tower, something that hadn't been invented during the age of Caesar?

The answer is, of course not. But critics give Shakespeare a pass. They claim his anachronisms are intentional! The rest of us aren't so lucky. I once had a critic complain that the American flags featured in my depression-era musical ELIOT NESS IN CLEVELAND contained fifty stars, at a time when our nation's flag boasted only forty-eight. (I have always been amazed at this critic's ability to count so fast. The flags were only on stage for a moment. But critics do have amazing superpowers.)

So, we do our best as we navigate the foreign country we call the past.

See SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin off-Broadway, February 16-March 21, produced by Amas Musical Theatre!

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Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin Part Two: Origins

In 1998, I was one of three playwrights (along with Alice Tuan and Carlos Murillo) commissioned to write one-person plays for the En Garde Arts production A SECRET HISTORY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE, performed on the rooftop of Seaward Park High School. En Garde Arts, for those of you who weren't around in NYC in the 1990s, was one of the most important, and exciting, theatre companies in the city at that time. They were famous for creating "site-specific" theatre works, in warehouses, street corners, abandoned theatres, and pretty much anywhere else that could accommodate (not always comfortably) actors and an audience. I loved working with them. Writing a play to be performed outside of an actual theatre put me in touch in an exciting and eye-opening way with the essence of the theatrical experience: actor, audience, space, and language. Plus, they were great people to work with.

In 1997, En Garde Arts had produced a show, Sweet Theresienstadt, in Prague. Theresienstadt was the Czech town designated as "Hitler's City for the Jews." Thesresienstadt, or Terezin as it is known to the Czech people, became a repository for "Jewish Prominenten:" Europe's most prominent Jewish intellectuals, war heroes, artists, musicians, actors, composers and well-to-do. The Nazis permitted the Jews of Terezin to create visual art, operas, cabarets, and symphonies. They showed off the ghetto to the Red Cross, and made a propaganda film (The Führer Gives the Jews a City), all designed to fool the world into thinking that Hitler's intentions for European Jewry were benign. In reality, the camp was overcrowded and disease-ridden. The inmates were undernourished, and the transports east to the Auschwitz death camp were frequent. More than 140,000 Jews passed through Terezin. More than 100,000 perished, including over 10,000 children.

For various legal reasons, En Garde Arts was unable to bring Sweet Theresienstadt to the US. Anne Hamburger, founder and Executive Producer of En Garde Arts, remained intrigued by the subject matter, however. She approached me about writing the libretto to a brand-new musical theatre piece on the same subject. Since I hadn't seen Sweet Theresienstadt (which hadn't been translated into English), I felt I could approach the subject from a fresh and original perspective.

Aside from the obvious dramatic potential, and the challenge of helping to bring to theatre-goers this lesser-known episode in the history of the Shoah, the subject intrigued me for another reason. Some of my own family had been sent to Terezin, including my great-great uncle, Joseph De Leeuw, along with his wife and his daughter, Lucy. Of the three, only Lucy survived the war.

Anne and I had several meetings with a composer/lyricist team, and the project looked good to go.

And then En Garde Arts shut down. As it turned out, SECRET HISTORY was to be the final En Garde Arts production. Anne assured me this wasn't my fault; the decision to shut down the company had nothing to do with SECRET HISTORY, which met box office expectations. I was relieved to know I had not done to En Garde Arts what Michael Cimino had done to United Artists.

Anne Hamburger went on to become the Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse, where she helped bring the original productions of both Thoroughly Modern Millie and Spring Awakening to the the stage. She followed this up with an eight-year stint as Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Creative Entertainment, and recently founded her own production company, Big Heart Theatrical.

I went on to re-write the libretto to my musical, ELIOT NESS IN CLEVELAND, previously produced at the Directors Company in NYC and at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and subsequently produced at the Cleveland Playhouse, under the direction of David Esbjornson. I also wrote the libretto for FLIGHT OF THE LAWNCHAIR MAN, which was then directed by Harold Prince at both the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia and the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, and then later directed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett at Goodspeed Musicals and 37 Arts in NYC.

Most importantly, during Michael J. Fox's farewell episode of Spin City, my wife, Michele, emerged from the bathroom waving an EPT stick and informed me that she was pregnant with our first child.

But the subject of Terezin wasn't finished with me, just yet.

As it turned out, Virginia Criste, a lawyer from California, had also been interested in producing a musical theatre piece about Terezin. Her own grandparents were sent to a death camp on one of the final transports from Terezin, and she had been traveling to Prague and Terezin even before the collapse of the Communist regime to research the subject. Virginia and Anne Hamburger had discussed co-producing the American premiere of Sweet Theresienstadt. When that production never happened, they too went their separate ways. But when Virginia decided to commission and produce a musical theatre piece set in Terezin on her own, she asked Anne to recommend a writer.

Anne, ever generous to emerging talent -- and also a woman of considerable taste and fine artistic judgment (he said humbly) -- recommended me.

Stay tuned for: "SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin Part Three: Origins, Chapter Two."

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