‘In Braunau’ tortures characters, audience
The thing about horror is you can’t enter it lightly. If you’re going to immerse your audience in nightmare a la “Gaslight” or “Rosemary’s Baby,” summoning the sort of dread that’s at once tawdry and coredeep, you really ought not do so in the spirit of play or experimentation. The stakes are too high. Those feelings aren’t toys.
After some revisions, Dipika Guha’s “In Braunau,” set in the present in Hitler’s childhood home, might become a surer guide into terror and revulsion. And as a San Francisco Playhouse Sandbox Series world premiere, changes might well be in its future. That vital program offers minimalist productions of new plays, a midpoint in the development process between staged readings and full main-stage productions.
But as of a Saturday, June 23, performance at the Rueff at ACT’s Strand, the show hadn’t yet justified the gruesome specters it raises.
Part of the problem is
that at first, “In Braunau” establishes itself not as horror but as light satire of overzealous progressivism. Sarah (Sango Tajima) and Justin (Josh Schell) have just expatriated from the U.S. to Braunau, Austria, to stop merely talking about their ideals and instead put them into practice. They lease the home in which Hitler lived until he was 3 to create a “bed-anddinner” — an inn open in particular to lefty guests, so that through “not talking” but “dialogue,” they might reclaim a “notorious” space and help set history on the right direction.
If that sounds so vague and naive that you smell a comeuppance on the way, you’re right on, and Tajima and Schell bring to these early scenes just the right touch. Their politics are inextricable from their handsy affection for one another; they love being in love and love being left of center. As the pair giddily brainstorm an ad for the inn on social media, Schell’s presence refreshes, as always — his subdued nature is the opposite of the stereotypical actor’s — and it contrasts perfectly with Tajima’s tightly sprung energy.
Of course, the new hotel doesn’t merely attract young people of color like Soha (Sam Jackson) and Jai (Mohammad Shehata) but also those with more inscrutable ends, like Braunau natives Katrine (Elissa Beth Stebbins) and Alfred (Timothy Roy Redmond), who try to disguise their shock that Sarah is Asian American.
If at first the couples’ clash plays out as a comedy of misunderstanding, the show soon takes a more sinister and surreal turn. The script tries to establish the possibility for that shift, with children’s singing that keeps popping in from a mysterious source and lights that keep flickering off. But under the direction of Susannah Martin, those devices more irk than stoke fear. The patchy electricity is indistinguishable from end-of-scene blackouts, and the children’s music is so on the nose that it might as well be singing, “Hello, I am a symbol of foreboding.”
From there, characters no longer mask their sexism and racism, and the gaslighting, silencing, imprisoning torment begins. The point seems to be to show how poorly we know our loved ones, how fragile are our crossracial bonds, how slippery is the slope from investigating an ideology to subscribing to it, how one extreme of the political spectrum can look awfully like the opposite one, how our prejudices and vulnerabilities always trump our education and carefully honed liberalism.
But watching all that unfold in “In Braunau” doesn’t feel all that different from watching the Nazis torture some random victim about whom we know nothing. Despite all the back story of the play’s first scenes, it’s like agony without context, agony from which we learn nothing.
Guha has proved herself a bold rule breaker before, notably with 2016’s “The Rules,” also part of the Playhouse’s Sandbox Series. But “In Braunau” shows that it’s not enough to flout conventions of genre. When you defy norms, you must also do the much harder work of writing your own new ones.