UNDERGROUND
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Sobol’s brilliant epic Underground, now onstage at the National Jewish Theater, deals with human beings struggling to survive in a moral vacuum. The play is mostly set in the hospital of the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, Poland, in 1943. The Nazis have proclaimed Jewish births to be illegal; pregnant women, if discovered, will be shot along with their husbands. Ghetto inhabitants have also begun to hear stories about mass executions of young, healthy Jews at Ponar, a nearby resort town. The central action of the play revolves around doctors Sonya Solodova (Lucy Childs) and Berka Weiner (Joe Van Slyke), who are trying to hide a typhus epidemic from the Nazis by inventing phony symptoms for their patients. Their cause is urgent: when typhus broke out among the Jews, in another nearby town, the Nazis burned the hospital to the ground, patients, staff, and all.
Sobol dramatizes the story with great clarity and passion and a good deal of extraordinarily dark humor. And at every turn he challenges his characters with heartbreaking moral dilemmas. Judith (Jackie Katzman), one of the hospital workers, discovers she is pregnant and refuses to have an abortion even though a pregnancy is an execution, not only for her but for the man she loves. Jacob Gens (Craig Spidle), a Jew put in charge of the ghetto by the Nazis, must turn over a regular quota of Jews for execution; when the Nazis ask for children, Gens bargains to offer up old people instead, hoping the Jewish community will support his decision. Dr. Weiner does nothing as one of his colleagues, the unscrupulous Dr. Lishafsky (Lee R. Sellars), is carted away for execution, even though just minutes before Weiner had risked his job–and perhaps his life–to keep a perfect stranger from suffering a similar fate. In one of the most arresting moments of the play Weiner concludes, “We should be ashamed that we are still alive.”
Fortunately the cast rein themselves in for the second act, and Underground reaches extraordinary heights. Even with Jones’s occasionally problematic staging–the big confrontation scene between Solodora and Weiner, exquisitely acted, is all but lost against a wall stage right–the production gains focus and momentum.
