Born Guilty
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I could be writing about America, whose history of slavery and genocide shapes the economic, class, and racial tensions that plague our present. As it happens, the play that stirs these thoughts is Born Guilty, about the legacy of Nazism in contemporary Germany. At first this production, running at A Red Orchid Theatre, sounded to me like yet another example of Chicago theaters’ willingness to address social problems on every front except the one at home. But it proves surprisingly timely in light of the resurgence of radical-right politics and anti-Semitic terrorism in Germany, Russia, South Africa, and right here in Chicago. And while it fails to explore the roots of fascism in economic instability and public fears of revolutionary anarchy–two factors that threaten to swamp the post-cold-war world–it does make an important point too often overlooked: a national trauma like German Nazism is really a tapestry of millions of individual traumas, a collection of dysfunctional families that add up to a dysfunctional culture.
Born Guilty is a collection of vignettes linked by the quest of one writer, an Austrian Jew named Peter, to interview adult children of former Nazis. At first dispassionate about the assignment, chosen by an editor as “a sexy angle” on the Holocaust, Peter is soon intrigued and perplexed by his subjects’ reluctance to talk about their families–not only with him but among themselves. Peter’s generation, born during or just after Hitler’s reign, was raised in a state of denial that they’ve never overcome; not only can they not discuss the Third Reich, they have trouble speaking of anything emotional.
But the production’s haunting, understated emotional impact stems largely from the sensitive story-theater-style direction of Shira Piven and her well-chosen nine-member cast’s superb and varied characterizations in multiple roles. A Chicago Tribune report on the 1991 Arena production noted tension between Arena’s director Zelda Fichandler, “who preferred . . . a documentary-like montage, . . . and Roth, who wanted more a dramatic story growing out of [Peter’s] developing relationships with his subjects.” Roth was right, and Piven’s on the same wavelength: her production, instead of banging us over the head with righteous indignation, insinuates itself into our consciousness, subtly charting Peter’s shifts–the more he learns, the more he realizes he doesn’t know.
