Tags: Dachau

Annula: An Autobiography

Based on an actual interaction the author had with a Holocaust survivor, the play is structured as an interview, with the survivor responding to questions from the voice of the interviewer. The drama chronicles the remembered experiences of Annulla Allen, a Polish Jew who married an Austrian Jew, survived in Germany by convincing authorities she was Aryan, was able to persuade the Nazis to release her husband from Dachau, and, after the war, moved to London.

Bent

On June 29-30, 1934 (the Night of the Long Knives), Max and his lover Rudy begin a nightmare odyssey through Nazi Germany, which on that night began a campaign to exterminate gay men. Max refuses to abandon Rudy. After they’re caught, while in transport to Dachau, Rudy is killed and Max horrifyingly broken. In Dachau, consumed by self-loathing, he begins a journey towards redemption, made possible by the love of another inmate, Horst. Max learns to love in return and, in summer 1936, thereby to accept himself and to come out as gay, an identity which he has denied. Inevitably doomed, both men refuse to submit to the Nazis and die defiantly.

La Ragazza di Dachau

The translation of the title is "the girl of Dachau," but is also a double entrendre for the "whore of Dachau"; the play presents a trial in which the court hears of the victimization of the female camp prisoner.

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.