2010's Ten Memorable Theater Moments You Might Have Missed 2011/01/01 Page 2

2010's Ten Memorable Theater Moments You Might Have Missed 2011/01/01 Page 2

Nice Way to Start 2011: Signs of Life Makes Broadway World.Com's list of "2010's Ten Memorable Theater Moments You Might Have Missed!" To quote:

"Members of the Freedom Party, who protested outside Broadway performances of The Scottsboro Boys, passed out flyers that asked, "Where is the song and dance musical about gas chambers?" Well, if they had ventured Off-Broadway this year they would have found it in Signs of Life, Peter Ullian, Len Schiff and Joel Derfner's musical drama about the Theresienstadt concentration camp; the Nazi's "City For The Jews," which was intended to appear as a safe and nurturing artist colony when inspected by the Red Cross. A musical-within-the-musical scene had Jewish prisoners, under the threat of being sent to the death camp of Auschwitz, partaking in a merry theatrical jamboree. With so many still under the impression that adding song and dance can only trivialize serious issues, it was a daring move for the creators of this ambitious musical."

Read more: http://broadwayworld.com/article/2010s_Ten_Memorable_Theater_Moments_You_Might_Have_Missed_20010101_page2#ixzz19nvS8Bzt

What I Learned About Playwriting From My Dad

Last night, I had a dream about my Dad, Dr. Robert Ullian, who passed away in 2005. I said to my wife, Michele, this morning, how much I wished he'd had a chance to see my show, Signs of Life, which just ended its five week run on March 21st. Michele said, of course, that he had.

Many survivors who saw our show, which takes place in the Jewish ghetto Terezin during World War Two, remarked upon how many details we managed to get right. A few took issue with details we got wrong -- usually deliberately, when the requirements of dramatic narrative took precedence over those of documentary. But for the most part, people who were actually imprisoned in Terezin were very generous and understanding about our efforts to balance truth and fiction, and most felt we got the balance just about right.

To the extent we got anything right, it's because we are good listeners. The most telling and remarkable details, such as the romantic gift of a home-made toilet seat, we learned about from interviews with survivors, not from books.

This ability to listen is something I owe very much to my Dad. Dr. Robert Ullian, a primary care physician who referred to himself as a simple country doctor (even though he practiced medicine in Cambridge and Boston), was widely considered to be one of the best diagnosticians in New England by his peers. When people asked him how he achieved this, his answer was simple: he listened to his patients.

To find out what critics and audiences said about Signs of Life, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.

To visit Peter Ullian's Website, click here.

To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.

To follow Peter Ullian on Twitter, click here.

To read Signs of Life lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.

To read Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life director Jeremy Dobrish's website, click here.

Remarks to the Beacon Hebrew Alliance

Recently, my shul, the Beacon Hebrew Alliance, organized a group to come see Signs of Life. Last Friday night, during Shabbat services, I made a few remarks about the show, in anticipation of this event. I'm publishing these remarks below:

Shabbat Shalom.

I’ve been asked to say a few words about my musical drama, Signs of Life, which is now running off-Broadway, and which some of you will be seeing this coming Sunday.

Signs of Life takes place during World War Two in the Czech village of Terezin.

Terezin is the Czech name for a town about 45 minutes outside of Prague. Built as a Garrison town in the late 19th century, it’s near a fortress, and the town itself is surrounded by twelve meter-thick walls, with several gates the only way to get in and out.

In 1942, the Nazis evacuated Terezin, which they called Theresienstadt, and ordered all the Czech Jews to relocate to the town. Terezin, which had previously held eight thousand Czech residents, became the overcrowded home to over sixty thousand displaced Jews.

The first transport of German Jews arrived soon thereafter. These were mostly elderly, decorated veterans of World War One, some of them amputees. They had been told they were going to spa. Instead, they were forced to sleep in unheated attics on straw mattresses. Most of them did not survive very long.

The Nazis eventually designated Terezin as a “Model Ghetto,” a “City for the Jews.” They filled the town with Jewish “prominenten,” or prominent people, from around Europe, including artists, writers, composers, musicians, actors, and cabaret performers. They allowed these new residents of Terezin to create art, give concerts, and hold lectures. They “beautified” the ghetto, invited the Red Cross to visit, and made a propaganda film: “The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews.”

The Nazi propaganda effort not only covered up the terrible conditions within Terezin – the overcrowding, the malnutrition, the disease – but also helped to hide from the world the reality of the death camps in the East. Even as they allowed cultural activities within Terezin, the Nazis ordered frequent deportations of the town’s inmates to Auschwitz. The vast majority of Terezin residents eventually perished there.

Most Terezin residents did not know what awaited them in “The East.” But they knew the conditions in the ghetto were terrible. Even as they were forced to participate in the Nazi propaganda effort, they used their artistic skill to try to leave a record of the truth of their surroundings. Artists risked their lives to make sketches of the misery around them, and hid them away in basements, under floorboards, or behind bricks. Those who were caught doing this were deported to Auschwitz, or executed. Some of these hidden sketches were recovered years later, and they comprise an amazing visual record. This effort to tell the truth through art is central to the story in Signs of Life.

In addition to the efforts of visual artists, composers created operas that provided thinly veiled critiques of Nazi Germany, such as Viktor Ullman’s “The Kaiser of Atlantis,” and cabaret singers wrote and performed satirical songs about the ghetto.

Nevertheless, despite this amazing cultural output, and the efforts of the adults in the ghetto to shield the children from the very worst, of the 144,000 Jews who were sent to Terezin, only 17,247 survived the war. Of the 15,000 children, less than 150 survived.

My involvement with this story began before I was born. My mother, Anna Clara Deleeuw, was born in Holland during the war. Her mother died of complications soon thereafter, and my mother was placed with a family who pretended she was their own, while her father went into hiding. Her father survived the war, but her close relatives who did not include her great-Uncle Simon, and her Uncle Alex Deleeuw, for whom, in part, my own son, Alexander, is named.

My mother’s Great-Uncle Joseph Deleeuw (my great-great uncle), his wife, and their daughter Lucy were imprisoned in Terezin. Lucy eventually made it to Switzerland, but Joseph and his wife both perished.

Some years ago, I was approached by a woman named Virginia Criste about writing a musical theatre piece that takes place in Terezin during the war. Virginia had researched her own family’s connection to the ghetto, and had discovered her grandparents were on the last transport to Auschwitz. Aware of my own family connection to Terezin, I said yes to the project. In collaboration with composer Joel Derfner, lyricist Len Schiff, and director Jeremy Dobrish, we began researching, writing, and developing the project.

Research for the project involved reading a lot of books, visiting Prague and Terezin, and interviewing survivors. The survivors were especially helpful in giving us a sense of life as it was lived in the ghetto. Through a plethora of small details, their generous reminisces helped us bring the story alive. There is in our show, for example, a somewhat outlandish gift a young man gives to the girl he loves. Although the characters are fictional, the moment is real – such gifts were actually quite common, and highly valued. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what it is, but when you see the show, I think you’ll know.

This brings us to an important issue we are often asked about: to what extent did we base our characters, and the events of the show, on the historical record? The balance between truth and fiction is, of course, a tricky one to maintain with a subject and immense and terrible as the Shoah. No dramatic narrative can ever achieve the kind of detailed accuracy of non-fiction or documentary. But it can, hopefully, communicate some of what the New York Times refers to as “the rough authority of novelistic truth” – a truthful sense of how some of the history depicted may have felt as it was being experienced. This, we hope, will bring the history closer to home for the audience.

As such, we made the choice early on to draw from the historical record, but also to allow ourselves the toolbox available to us as creative artists. We also felt, as an ethical matter, that it would have been wrong to have tried get inside the thoughts of historical people who did not survive Terezin. Who can say, after all, what really went on in their minds, what their thoughts, fears, and hopes were? All we can do is imagine what those thoughts might have been. We therefore felt more comfortable taking that imaginative leap into fictional characters, whose experiences mirrored those of historical ones.

So, many of the events and characters depicted in Signs of Life are based on or inspired by real people and historical incidents. But, in the end, our show is narrative fiction, it is not history. We hope, for those interested in the Terezin, that Signs of Life can provide a kind of emotional entry into the subject. But it should not be viewed as a substitute for old-fashioned history.

An example of how this approach is reflected in the show itself: a famous cabaret singer named Kurt Gerron was an inmate in Terezin. We have a character named Kurt Gerard who is also a famous cabaret singer, and is similar in many – but not in all -- ways to his historical namesake.

Another question we are frequently asked is “why a musical?” There is a fear, not unjustified, that the musical form would trivialize the subject.

There are several parts this answer:

First, the historical Terezin was filled with music – cabaret, chorus, classical, opera, popular song – and in that way, the setting lends itself to the form.

In addition, the central drama of Terezin – the propaganda artifice that hides brutal reality – is, itself, highly theatrical, and naturally lends itself to musical theatre, the most highly theatrical dramatic form.

And, finally, the notion of the musical as something frothy and not suited to serious subjects is not one that we share. Showboat, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, Assassins, Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story all take on serious subjects. Ultimately, one could just as easily trivialize this subject in a non-musical play, or a novel.

The rule of thumb when writing a musical is that when the emotions are too intense for the spoken word, that’s when the characters sing. And, of course, you could not find a subject with greater or more intense emotions than this one.

I should also address something Elie Wiesel has said – that the Shoah should never be the subject of art, because any effort to create art from the Shoah will always fall short. I don’t entirely disagree with this. But, of course, Mr. Wiesel did create art out of the Shoah, with his autobiographical novel, Night. And the fact of the matter is, art is how human beings address and commemorate the great tragedies of our history, going all the way back, at the very least, to the war at Troy. I believe that if we do not try to grapple with this subject in art, we will have failed in our duty as human beings to remember the Shoah and to honor its victims.

The creators of Signs of Life have ourselves been deeply honored by the reaction of survivors who have seen our show. They have been enormously generous. While recognizing the need for compression of detail and for dramatic invention, they have said we captured something truthful and powerful about Terezin in our show, and have done so without the easy sentimentality that they so often find in efforts to deal with this subject. Their kind words have meant more to us than any newspaper review, no matter how enthusiastic, ever could.

I thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing you at the show.

Signs of Life runs through March 21st.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To find out what critics and audiences are saying about Signs of Life, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.

To visit Peter Ullian's Website, click here.

To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.

To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.

To read Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's blog, click here.

To visit director Jeremy Dobrish's website, click here.

Making Nazis Sing

Signs of Life's lyricist, Len Schiff, just wrote on this very subject on his own blog. So, I'll put in my two cents not so much on the subject of singing Nazis, but, rather, the choices involved in creating characters on stage who are Nazi soldiers.

Writing any type of narrative fiction in which Nazis are characters is, of course, a challenge. You don't want to create obvious, goose-stepping archetypes, even if it sometimes seems as if the historical Nazis were intent upon turning themselves into just that. If you are to be true to yourself as a dramatist, you need to make an effort to find out what makes a person tick, no matter how repulsive that person may be. The Nazis were evil, let's not wiggle around that essential truth -- if "evil" has any meaning, the Nazis were its embodiment. The challenge to the dramatist is to recognize they were evil human beings, not evil cartoon characters; they were monstrous, but they were monstrous people, not monstrous melodrama villains. They had hopes and desires. They had families. They loved their children and their pets. And they perpetrated one of the greatest crimes in human history.

How do you reconcile these two realities? How do you get inside the head of such people? Is it possible to understand them? And if you understand them, does that mean, on some level, you sympathize with them? Are you asking the audience to sympathize them? Do you want them to?

Well, my answer is no. I do not want anyone to sympathize with the Nazi characters in Signs of Life. Even fictional Nazis do not deserve our sympathy.

But I do want those characters in our show to be compelling, to be worth the audience's time, and to feel like real people, not stereotypes.

So, how do you get there?

While undoubtedly volumes can be written on the various personality types who made up the Nazi Party, two types of people intrigued me the most, perhaps because they were the two types I felt I best understood, having seen less extreme versions of them in our own day and age: the cynic and the true believer. The cynic embraces the Nazi ideology for personal gain, to advance his career, to seize power, and to maintain a secure place for himself in society. The true believer actually believes in the Nazi ideology. He is, in a very disturbing way, an idealist.

In our show, Commandant Rahm is the cynic. Officer Heindel is the true believer. I still ask myself which one is the more reprehensible, more truly evil. I don't think there is ultimately any answer to that question.

This focus on these two characters got me started, but I need to dig deeper. I had some insight into why some of the Nazis did what they did, but I still had a hard time figuring out how they could possible have done it.

Joel Derfner, Signs of Life's composer, and I visited Terezin in 2002, when my son, Alexander, was less than two years old. I remember walking around Terezin, and looking at the wall upon which is written the names of all the children who passed through that "model" ghetto: 15,000, of whom only 132 survived.

I just couldn't understand it. It's one thing to convince oneself that a group of people are deserving of hatred. I thought I could imagine that. But how could anyone actually look at a living, breathing child and treat him or her with such disregard of their common humanity? People say that the Nazis didn't view Jewish children as human. True. But how often have you seen people treat animals with the kind of capricious cruelty with which the Nazis treated the Jews? There's a special kind of cruelty that people reserve for other people.

The epiphany that opened the door for me was a small item I encountered in my research:

Suicide rates were high among the SS Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis death squads whose job in the early years of the Shoah was to murder Jews by hand. The reason the Nazis invented the gas chambers was to try to put some distance between the victims and their executioners, in the hope of bringing down the suicide among the SS.

One is first struck by the horrific irony of this. It did not seem to occur to the Nazis that what they were doing violated all standards of human decency. Instead, they decided a more efficient means of slaughter was required.

But upon reflection, I wondered, why was the SS suicide rate high? Why were people who acted without conscience troubled enough to take their own lives? If the actions they were engaged in were so objectionable, why did they willingly take those actions in the first place, and continue to do so?

My conclusion was that, at least for some, while they could not possiblly have had any conscious qualms about what they were doing (or else they could not have continued to do it), on an unconscious level something deeply human inside of them was rebelling, something that they were not fully aware of.

This I found to be cold comfort. On the one hand, it's good to know that some form of human decency exists on an instinctual level. On the other hand, it's horrifying to think that this instinct can be so successfully tamped down as to result in the murder of millions.

It's this contradiction we've tried to explore in the character of Heindel in Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin. We are not seeking sympathy or "understanding." But we have endeavored to treat our audience with enough respect to offer them portraits of human beings rather than caricatures.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.

To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.

To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.

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.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To find my "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.