1940s anti-fascist drama conveys a timely message
Lillian Hellman’s ‘Watch on the Rhine’ gets gripping revival
Lillian Hellman always probed the heart of America. She wrote a about a young country too often ruled by fear and greed, a country in danger of losing track of its best self.
In “Watch on the Rhine,” now in a gripping revival at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the playwright famed for “The Little Foxes” crafted what by all rights should be a creaky 1941 melodrama about beating back the Nazis hordes bent on usurping the world. Instead, Lisa Peterson’s potent staging of the play — likely best known for its 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis — amplifies its unsettling echoes with the here and now. Hellman strips away the illusions of safety and decorum that seduce good people into thinking that evil will never come for them.
Suspense fuels the stylish period piece, a thrilling cross between a political parable and a drawingroom farce, for most of its nearly three-hour running time.
From the first time we meet Sara (sensitively played by Sarah Agnew) and her bedraggled children, we understand that they are political refugees, poor and desperate. They’ve been on the run for so long, the children know better
than to expect food on the table. Fleeing Europe in tatters, Sara returns home to her palatial family manse in Washington, D.C. Neil Patel’s gorgeously intricate set captures a world where appearances are paramount, from the woodwork on the ceiling to the blossoms through the window. This is a life of ease, a life apart from the fray.
Certainly Sara is nervous about seeing her mother, Fanny (Caitlin O’Connell), again. An indomitable matriarch who rings an alarm siren to signal breakfast every morning at 9, Fanny can not imagine a world of concentration camps, of torture and starvation. She feels secure in her milieu of grandeur.
The nimbly comic O’Connell captures Fanny’s flightiness but also her wit.
She fears that her son David (Hugh Kennedy), a lawyer who hasn’t yet married, will never shine brightly enough to burnish her late husband’s legacy. She also knows that Sara’s stolid husband, Kurt (Elijah Alexander), cannot provide for them but he is nevertheless a man of substance. She just can’t guess what that means on the brink of World War II.
A mesmerizing Alexander burns with the gravity of Kurt’s mission, his unyielding fight to free the world of fascism. His explanation of why he can not leave the resistance, no matter what it costs him, is as harrowing as it is understated.
A man with a scarred face and broken bones, Kurt is the soul of gentleness for as long as that is called for.
His eventual explosion is one of the play’s finest moments.
The highly charged first act of this nail-biter lures us with bracing suspense about whether Fanny’s shady house guests, the dastardly Count Teck De Brancovis (Jonathan Walker) and his terrorized wife, Marthe (an electric turn by Kate Guentzel), will turn Kurt in to Hitler’s minions.
The third act in this coproduction with the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis unfortunately bogs down a bit in stilted exposition that undercuts the chilling atmosphere. The pause the director inserts as an act break also upsets the rhythm of this otherwise absorbing production. For his part, Walker never musters up enough menace to make the count truly threatening.
Still when blood is shed, when the brutality of the real world intrudes upon Fanny’s clan forever, Hellman’s bravery is palpable. It may seem obvious now that the Nazis were a threat to mankind but at the time there were many who were content to look the other way and wait for the storm of tyranny to pass. That shattering exploration of the nature of complicity is what makes “Rhine” so explosive once again.