Apt Pupil
Splinter Group Studio
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What’s interesting about Peter Weiss’s The Investigation and Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, being performed respectively by Splinter Group and the Defiant Theatre to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, is that neither ever mentions the word “Jew.” Like many attempts made over the years, these plays aim to universalize the Holocaust to make it understandable to a contemporary audience, taking the point of view that what happened to the Jewish people in the 30s and 40s could happen to anybody. Such an approach can be useful, making it clear that the Holocaust is not simply a German-Jewish issue, but it can also lead to dangerous overgeneralization. These days the word “holocaust” is used to describe any number of horrific incidents. Zionist tactics in dealing with Palestinian refugees are likened to Nazi actions. King’s Apt Pupil seeks to draw parallels between hapless Germans in Nazi Germany and isolated upper-middle-class folks in American suburbs. Articles in knee-jerk left-wing rags and graffiti in Wicker Park suggest that Buchenwald and Auschwitz are somehow comparable to Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. But no matter how strongly playwrights stress the universality of the Jewish experience under the steel-toed boot of Nazi rule, the Holocaust remains frighteningly unique. Never before and never since has the annihilation of a people been so brutally, extensively, and–worst of all–effectively carried out. Human cruelty is universal, and accounts of man’s inhumanity to man never cease to shock and defy imagination. But only Nazi Germany turned cruelty into a national industry.
Apt Pupil, along with the other stories in his 1982 collection Different Seasons, represented King’s first attempt to be taken as more than just the author of stories intended to shock and titillate adolescent-minded readers. Exploring the human fascination with evil and his belief that Nazism represented not an aberration but the realization of people’s darkest and most twisted fantasies, King tells the story of Todd Bowden (in the aborted movie version, he was to be played by Ricky Schroeder), an all-American boy who reads accounts of Nazi war crimes with the same sick, inchoate, masturbatory fascination with which adolescent boys peruse their parents’ Victoria’s Secret catalogs–the sort of quiet, intelligent suburban boy who collects war memorabilia and grows up to be Timothy McVeigh.
