Hunting Down Nazis and Surviving the Holocaust, at a Cost
Ken JaworowskiNovember 5, 2014: There’s a large map on the set of Wiesenthal, and hundreds of books line the onstage shelves. The script, too, is filled with information: dates, names, statistics. But it’s the personal moments that at times elevate this otherwise standard one-man show about the life of Simon Wiesenthal. Born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine, Wiesenthal was transferred among several Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He survived the Holocaust and dedicated his life to memorializing the millions who were killed in the camps, and to hunting down their murderers. The play, set in 2003, two years before his death, relates the details of a few of his investigations. Among them were the pursuit of Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the Treblinka death camp, and the search for the officer who arrested Anne Frank. Wiesenthal’s persistence and hard-won humor are well conveyed throughout the 90-minute running time. Yet much of what is told here can be gleaned from the countless stories written by or about him. The script, by Tom Dugan, who also stars, is straightforward and frequently static. Tales that might lend themselves to theatrical tension are often merely recounted. Controversy, too, is avoided; as Dwight Garner, a critic for The New York Times, once wrote in a review of a Wiesenthal biography, he “was a complicated hero, an angel with dirty wings.” Such complexity is rarely approached.
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