Enjoy one of the best and most difficult conversations I've had in years with "Dr. Drama" (a practicing psychologist and theatre-lover who uses theatre to explore and disucss psychological themes in the mainstream. She runs a brilliant blog featuring "Interviews & insight from Broadway's psychologist.")
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[TW: This article contains a discussion of the Holocaust and pictures of white nationalists and Nazi Germany.]
As I prepared to interview sage actor and writer Alexandra Silber (Fiddler on the Roof, author of After Anatevka and White Hot Grief Parade) about her role in the Olney Theatre production of Cabaret,
I kept thinking about the parallels between the nationalist, xenophobic
song, “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and the war cry of white nationalists
saying, “The Jews will not replace us” during their march in
Charlottesville in 21017. Cabaret is a show
that both helps us elucidate the past and reflects upon contemporaneous
issues. With anti-Semitism and other hate crimes on the rise in recent
years, this show, its questions, and its provocation are the kind of
theater that we need. I spoke with Al about what this musical tells us
about how hatred takes hold, how this show is impacting audiences, and
the ways in which doing this show is an act of resistance.
What do you think the show is saying about how fascism comes to power and how xenophobia gains ground?
It’s really crucial to draw contemporary
social parallels that are at the moment all too prescient, such as the systematic hunting down of “illegals”, the trauma being caused, and
dehumanization.
One thing I think is really, really
important to say before we get into anything else, just as a huge disclaimer, is that a crucial distinction is they [immigrants] are not
being systematically terminated and murdered. In the Holocaust, we should never forget that 9 million people were systematically exterminated. (And for Russia scholars, they probably add 20 more
million people to that.) I don’t want to say that in terms of exclusivity, what I want to say is those people’s memories are lost and need to be honored for what it is and not diminished by being compared to something that it is not.
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| Torch-bearing white nationalists rally around a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Aug. 11, 2017. (Edu Bayer/The New York Times) |
It’s important to make that
distinction like you said, to honor their lives, to distinguish how
what’s happening now in our country is different from what happened and
also to move the discussion forward. There are important lessons to be
gleaned from what did happen that we can apply to what’s happening right
now.
Correct and also it doesn’t mean that it
won’t happen. I think that we’re starting to become even more aware of that as things become scarier in our waking world. The further away we
get from the Holocaust and the rise of the Nazi party in time, the more it really does feel foreign to younger people, something that happened
in the past, as far away as Medieval times and the dinosaurs walking the
Earth. The way that we got there is exactly the way we’re walking there
right now and that’s the beginning of this conversation.
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| ‘Cabaret’ at Olney Theatre Center. (Photo: Stan Barouh) |
Hitler and authoritarians like him
didn’t invent or create racism. They didn’t create anti-Semitism or
anti-immigrantion points-of-view or nationalism. They didn’t invent
those, they have fertilized on those feelings that were already there
and are lying dormant in our humanity. When people feel their survival
is being challenged, they operate completely for the fear-based place
and the worst of them comes out.
Fascism and racists aren’t born, they’re made. As it is said in South Pacific, “you have to be carefully taught”.
The rise of fascism and the rise of
specific targeted hate associated with fascism, it happens in stages. It
starts with dehumanization, it moves on to expulsion, the removal of
rights and it ends ultimately with extermination. We are already at
three out of four. When we start to be unmoved watching video after
video of children being separated from their families, begging people to
treat them like human beings, that’s how we know dehumanization is
working.
And once upon a time in the rise of Nazi
Germany, Jews were being compared with rats. First they said that they
do not belong here, they are not German. Even Jews who were born in
Germany were called, “generational interlopers”, which is exactly what
is being said now about people from Mexico, central South America and
the Middle East. They are generational interlopers and they are stealing
our business. They are taking our jobs, they are ruining our economy
for the people that “belong” here. And the more you compare them to
vermin, the more palatable the concept of exterminating them because
they’re not human beings.
Then second, we start to get into
expulsion, now Jews can only live in this part of town. They have to
identify themselves with a Star of David on their clothing. We have to
round them up and put them somewhere and then suddenly we have the
removal of rights, meaning you don’t get to vote, you have to pay higher
taxes, you don’t get to have state benefits. That’s already happening
in America with access to public services, even if you’re documented.
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| Jewish families being forced out of their homes by Nazis in Poland (Photo: Getty Images) |
The next thing we got here on the list
is extermination. Once you have Hitler, it’s too late. That means that
you have been operating inside your bubble for so long that you didn’t
see evil right there. I think for a lot of people, they just felt so
secure. New York City, Los Angeles, these cities were so incubated in
their liberalism that they didn’t even connect with, speak to, pay
attention to any other opinions that were happening in different parts
of the country. It’s a lot like Berlin in the 1930’s.
Cabaret is a play about the
price and the cost of complicity. What does it cost to identity with
evil? To actively do nothing? And the play is an answer to the question,
“How did this happen?” Then the show ends with the question, “What are
you going to do about it?”
Can we talk about what a song like, “Money” says about how economic fear and xenophobia?
One of the things I don’t think I ever
fully grasped is that the song is commenting upon how Cliff has decided
to blindly smuggle money for the Nazis. Cliff is a protagonist, a “good
American boy”. He has decided to ask no questions and go back and forth
with these briefcases full of cash and do what he has to do to pay his
rent. So many people were in precisely that position. I think what’s
really profound about Cliff is that he has the ability to ask deeper
questionnaires, he has the ability to comprehend their answers, he just
completely declines to. He’s different from Sally who is operating in
ignorance. She is like so many of us, her weakness is that she cannot
bear the ugly. Of course we must laugh and celebrate and heal and
continue on with as much joy as we can muster but there’s a huge
distinction from that and blocking out reality.
We have a responsibility to humanity.
I’ll openly admit that five or six years ago, I was a person that
thought, I don’t have a revolutionary spirit and I don’t find politics
particularly interesting. A couple of causes mean a lot to me but on the
whole, it’s not my thing. And then 2016 happened. I am Jewish and I am
white passing. I’m an artist, but I live in a socioeconomic bracket that
isn’t poverty. So I am privileged, it wouldn’t change my way of life
whatsoever if I didn’t want to look. But my human conscience won’t allow
me to have people and the news speak of my friends and colleagues as if
their lives are worthless or don’t exist. Perhaps that comes from the
echoes of 1930’s Germany that I feel in my DNA.
In the Jewish community, we have this
phrase “Never Again”. My question to the world who is listening to and
reading this is, what does that mean? If it’s just something we say,
then it becomes a trope without action. It requires resistance. If you
ever wondered who you’d be and what you would do during the Holocaust,
you’re doing it right now.
There is this almost hysterical
denial represented in the show. In 1930’s Berlin, it was music and booze
and drugs. Currently, it may still be alcohol and drugs but it’s also
our phones that we use to get those dopamine rushes that keep us
satiated.
We live in a society of decadence, the
decadence is simply personal, external validation. Whereas once upon a
time it was partying all night long, we’ve completely replaced that with
our phones, which doesn’t make it any less decadent. We are
distracted.
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| Alexandra Silber as Sally Bowles (Photo: Stan Barouh) |
Cabaret is a show that confronts. Given the world we currently live in, how have your audiences been responding?
In the original production, they very
famously staged a mirror that was in the very back of the club that was
revealed and audience saw itself in the final moments. What it says is
you are now watching yourself watch as families burn. By confronting
yourself in the mirror, the innate subtextual question there is, are you
a different person than that person watching?
What we all wanted with this production
was for people in the audience to be so disturbed and so shaken that
they donated money, that they called their Congress-person, that they
did something. We have a Brechtian ending where we turn on the
lights and we look directly in their eyes. We are all standing on stage,
every single person in the company. I look in a patron’s eyes for 30
silent seconds. There’s some people that look all around, still trying
to have audience-actor relationship.There are people that are extremely
confrontational, that feel tricked that you made me laugh and you asked
me to applaud and now you’re punishing me. And then there are people
that are weeping that say I don’t know what to do but this 30 seconds of
being held by your eyes is helping me find the strength to do
something.
The whole purpose of theater, going back
to its origin, was to have a group catharsis and for political action
because everyone in the community, including the Greek senators, were
there. Actors were speaking directly to their representatives and in our
society we have been told, and hopefully those truths will remain so,
that we are in charge of our own political destiny with the power of our
vote and the power of our voice. If that holds true, then hopefully
when you attend any piece of theater you have your cathartic experience,
whether it be joy or sorry, but please also leave the theater and do
something with those emotions. Take action for it to make the world a
better place.
We really need a show like Cabaret right now. We need to lean into the awareness and the political.
One of my favorite things I’ve learned is the Hebrew phrase, chevak v’ematz, which means “travel bravely”. There’s this beautiful little micro scene at the very end of Cabaret
where Herr Shultz stops to say goodbye to Cliff and Sally. Cliff says
to him, “I wish you much Mazel [good luck]” and Herr Shultz responds,
“Mazel. That is what we all need.” I always feel hit that he would say
that, the ancient wisdom there is so crucial. It’s not travel safely,
it’s travel bravely.
Best,
Dr. Drama
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