Theatre for social change: The legacy of George Tabori


Rebecca Rovit, associate professor of theatre

LAWRENCE – George Tabori, whose own father died at Auschwitz, did not believe the Holocaust was too serious a subject to treat with humor. Rather, he used absurdity and dark comedy to discomfit and bring about an ethical-witness relationship between the audience and the unthinkable.

Rebecca Rovit, now associate professor in the University of Kansas Department of Theatre & Dance, experienced this dynamic personally while attending a couple of Tabori’s plays in Germany, shortly after the Berlin Wall fell. It informed her work on a chapter in the new book “Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori,” (University of Michigan Press) edited by Martin Kagel and David Saltz.

Her chapter is titled “Parsing the Jewish Question: Ethical Witnessing, Tabori, and the Theatrical Representation of the Holocaust.” Throughout her career, Rovit’s research has centered on theatre and the Shoah — both works written and performed by concentration camp prisoners as well as post-war works responding to the Nazi attempt at Jewish genocide.

Rovit said Tabori – born in Budapest, Hungary, exiled to England and the United States, and eventually returned to Europe — is almost unknown in the United States due to the few translations and productions of his work (some of which are originally in English) here.

Given that American and European audiences relate to World War II differently, “I think there is a cultural difference, as well, in terms of what his plays ask of the audience,” Rovit said. “They're irreverent. They're very witty, but they're tendentious in the humor that he uses. They're in your face ... almost purposely transgressive.”

Rovit wrote about Tabori’s 1990 play, titled “Weisman and Copperface: A Jewish Western,” which she saw performed onstage in Berlin. She sketches the opening tableau with “a painted back screen, reminiscent of a Hollywood Western (Tabori worked as a Hollywood screenwriter during the 1940s and '50s). A vulture perched in a tree overlooks a sparse desert-like setting ... A middle-aged man (the salesman, Arnold Weisman) enters ... Weisman carries a bag, which contains his wife’s ashes. ‘You don’t look Jewish, especially now as a heap of ashes,’ he addresses the bag, thrusting it toward his daughter. ‘Here, hold your mother!’”

He soon encounters the other titular figure, an American Indian.

Rovit said, “Within minutes, we audience members are thrust into a grotesque world that makes us chuckle, gasp, and then squirm uncomfortably.”

Audiences who intuitively understand – and perhaps share – the author’s status as an oppressed minority can laugh at such things, Rovit said. Germans and Austrians laugh, too, she said, because of how Tabori breaks taboos as they confront topics like satirizing Hitler.

The same is true, she said, of Tabori’s satirical “Mein Kampf,” which Rovit called “an absolutely hilarious farce about the young Hitler in Vienna.”

Tabori, who died in 2007 in Berlin, was not exactly riffing on Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler,” in Rovit’s estimation. The Brechtian concept of aesthetic distancing is a more direct antecedent, she wrote.

She began researching Tabori for the book essay following a 2015 conference organized by the editors. Like that meeting, she said, the book is designed “to give justice to someone, in this case a real theatre maker, who will go places other playwrights hadn't gone before. He has very specific aesthetic, dramaturgical devices he employs in his plays to help engender an active, self-questioning spectator.”

Rovit said she taught Tabori’s play “The Cannibals” for years before being asked to write an essay for the book. It’s important, she said, for a class focusing on theatre of the Holocaust, or genocide more generally, to go beyond the classic “The Diary of Anne Frank,” in which, she noted, the audience never sees the perpetrators onstage or hears their thoughts.

“It's really refreshing and important to look at how other plays with themes concerning genocide take different angles and especially how playwrights use very different strategies to engage the audience member,” Rovit said. “And I'm not alone. Many of my colleagues are interested in what we call theatre for social change. Instead of just crying for Anne Frank, are there ways — and I think there are — to create in us a kind of spectator-witness; that is, someone who can not only be moved emotionally but might become more of a critical, self-questioning thinker?”

Rovit said Tabori and many of the playwrights he has influenced force audiences to confront the question, “Do we have a moral obligation to bear witness to genocide and expose war crimes? It’s a question we’re asking these days.”

Image: Rebecca Rovit, holding a copy of the new book on George Tabori to which she contributed. Credit: Rick Hellman/KU News Service

Tue, 04/12/2022

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Rick Hellman

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