Benjamin Barlow
Three cast members from Bent on stage.
Martin Sherman’s 1979 play Bent is being presented by Strollers Theatre on the Drury Stage at the Bartell Theatre through Oct. 29.
Scholars believe that six million Jews were killed as part of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution,” a perverse plan to eradicate the world of racial and ethnic undesirables as he worked to create a “master race.” Jews were targeted and murdered in greater numbers than any other group, but they were not the only ones Hitler’s forces killed, starting in the 1930s and continuing until the end of World War II. Thousands of Roma, ethnic Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Germans, and Russian prisoners of war also died in German forced labor camps. In addition, because homosexuality was illegal in Germany and seen by the Third Reich as a biological defect, 100,000 gay men were arrested and 50,000 were jailed between 1933 and 1945. Though exact numbers are hard to verify, an estimated 15,000 were sent to die in concentration camps.
This subset of horror is the subject of Martin Sherman’s 1979 play Bent, on the Drury Stage at the Bartell Theatre through Oct. 29. The first play of Strollers Theatre’s 65th season, it is an examination of one man’s journey from the decadence of booze, drugs and sex in the clubs of Weimar Berlin to torture and isolation in the prison camp at Dachau. It is also a painful portrait of his reckoning with his own identity and self-worth, as he realizes that he can’t outsmart a system that categorizes him as sub-human.
Aided by an ambitious set design, including a revolve, director Sean Langenecker keeps the play moving in the first act as we follow protagonist Max (Patrick O’Hara) from his apartment in Berlin, to a night club, to a public park, to a homeless encampment in the forest, to a train bound for the concentration camps. In each of these scenes the audience receives snippets of vital information to piece together Max’s personal history and his moral and emotional character.
In the opening, we meet Max’s longtime lover and roommate, a struggling dancer named Rudy (played with heart by Lennox Forrester). Sensitive and tolerant to a fault, Rudy not only mothers and cares for Max, he excuses his wildly inappropriate behavior — which includes regularly partying until he blacks out, bringing random young men home for wild sex under false pretenses, and grifting his way through life, using anyone for money and entertainment.
In a later scene with his considerably more closeted uncle Freddie (an apt Joel Davidson), Max initially rejects his relative’s staid, quiet lifestyle, along with the bitter disapproval of his wealthy family. But in an interesting and immediate contradiction, Max displays loyalty to his barely acknowledged partner, along with acquiescence to a ruthlessly practical plan to renounce himself and play the part of the conventional inheritor of the family business, if it means his money troubles will be over.
When this conflicted hedonist, who both loves and loathes his life, ends up on a train bound for the destruction of all aboard, the play changes. In the second act, Max’s resourcefulness, his ability to work any system to his advantage, and his refusal to be emotionally vulnerable all change. While the prisoners engage in meaningless heavy labor, Max falls in love with Horst (Edric Johnson), a fellow inmate. The depth of this real, emotional bond makes the loss at the end of the play overwhelming and tragic.
The best part of this production is Patrick O’Hara’s portrayal of the main character Max, who must evolve tremendously over the 2 ½ hour performance, in the midst of the unthinkable violence of the Nazi machine. O’Hara is unafraid to be initially unlikable, and constantly distracted from the emotional needs of others while he calculates his next self-serving deal. And the development of Max’s relationship with Horst unfolds slowly, earnestly, leading to intimacy without the benefit of an extended gaze, a physical touch, or any of the trappings of Max’s former life. It is a relationship literally stripped bare.
To enjoy the stark, emotional evolution of this production of Bent is to overlook its imperfections. The uneven cast makes some scenes unintentionally comic. Fuzzy sound design, underutilized lighting design and imprecise fight choreography ask the audience to fill in a lot of the blanks in the play in their own minds, undercutting several climactic scenes and robbing them of their power. Brand new, impeccably clean black and white prison uniforms erase the hardships of the camp, and unfortunately, there are few other visual or emotional markers that communicate the passage of time and the physical deterioration of the characters. Finally, the lack of a strong emotional connection between Max and Horst makes the love story in the second half of the play one-sided.
The challenging script, which was Tony Award-nominated for Best Play, is repetitive and spare at times. Less overt storytelling on the page demands more nuance and intention in performance to infuse these repetitions with meaning. Hopefully these passages will develop more fully over the play’s run.
