Old Wicked Songs

A two character play set in the Vienna rehearsal studio between the spring and summer of 1986, when Austria is forced to confront its Holocaust past, due to the revelation of president Kurt Waldheim's alleged Nazi past. Twenty-five-year-old Jewish piano student Stephen Hoffmann, a former child prodigy who has not performed for a year, studies with Professor Josef Mashkan, whose outwardly anti-Semitic remarks drive the student away. After a visit to Dachau and a sexual encounter with a Jewish woman, he returns. Ultimately, Hoffmann saves his teacher from an attempted suicide and discovers that he is actually a concentration camp survivor.