Browse the Plays
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- Experience Chronicled
- Allegoric or Metaphoric Representations
- Concentration and Extermination Camps
- Deniers and Denial
- Germany, Hitler and the Growth of Nazism
- European Jewry Before the Holocaust
- Escape
- The Ghettos
- Hiding
- Righteous Gentiles
- Rescue
- Resistance
- Liberation
- Nazi War Crimes and Judgement
- Other Victims of Nazi Persecution
- Perpetrators, Bystanders and Collaborators
- Survivors and Subsequent Generations
- Theater During Holocaust
- Women and the Holocaust
- Experience Chronicled
Tags: love
An American in Paris
After the end of World War II, Jerry, an American GI, decides to remain in Paris and attempts to start a new life as a painter. He falls in love with Lise, a beautiful Jewish-French girl who survived the Holocaust by living in hiding with a French family. Inspired by the Academy Award-winning film of the same name, the musical includes songs by George and Ira Gershwin. Directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon.
Black Sand
A Polish Jew, who is a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, is visited by his young daughter who has emigrated from Poland and is in love with a black man. After her father murders the man, the daughter begins a relationship with a Frenchman. The play also contains a subplot about a Polish woman and her Latvian husband, who as an SS officer in a concentration camp during the war, saved her and her mother’s life. However, the wife does not really love her husband and is, instead, emotionally involved with a Polish immigrant.
Budapest
It is 1962 in New York City and would-be screenwriters, twenty-something Arnie and Robb, attend the funeral of a once famous Austrian Jewish actor hoping to meet celebrities who might help jumpstart their careers. They meet Minna, the dead man’s beautiful 40-year-old sister, a survivor of both the Nazis and the Soviet gulag who invites them into her life. She has a story of remarkable survival—as a Jew in a German camp, liberated by the Soviets who then imprison her in a gulag because she's an Austrian baroness through an early marriage. An ageing actress in the manner of Dietrich wishes to play Minna in a film, a story that could help revive the actress’ career and launch the young men’s careers as screenwriters. Minna is reluctant to capitalize on her Holocaust story—it is the one thing she values and does not wish to be degraded in a film. Her love affair with one of the young men leads to a change of mind—but it has remarkable consequences for all involved. Budapest is a dark comedy, a modern Camille, and a story of love and betrayal, recreating the fragile world of theatre émigrés in New York in the decades following World War II.
Cabaret
As the Nazis begin their rise to power in Germany in the late 1920s, an American writer visits the sleazy Kit Kat Klub in Berlin and meets an English singer, Sally Bowles. The writer and singer soon fall in love. His elderly landlady gets engaged to a Jewish greengrocer despite the increasing influence of the Nazis. He has been inadvertently helping the Nazis by delivering packages to Paris for a German friend of his and ends up deciding to return to the United States, while Sally, after aborting their baby, decides to remain in Berlin.
Candle in the Wind
Written when the Nazis invaded France, the three-act melodramatic play focuses on the relationship between an American actress and her French Resistance fighter lover, who is captured by the German occupiers.
Consequences: The Trial of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Examines Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immigration policies during WWII through the eyes of survivor Arthur Mandel. When Arthur dies and is seeking admission to heaven, he has two goals: to be reunited with his wife Leah who died in Auschwitz, and to avenge FDR, whose policies were the cause of her death. God grants Mandel permission to put FDR on trial, and from the confrontations of the trial, the play shifts back in time to the romance between Arthur and Leah, as well as to the horror Leah experiences in Auschwitz.
East of Berlin
Standing outside his father’s study in Paraguay, Rudi is smoking cigarettes, trying to work up the courage to go in. It has been seven years since he left his family and their history behind him. As a teenager, Rudi discovered that his father was a doctor at Auschwitz. Trying to reconcile his inherited guilt, Rudi lashes out against his father and his friends, and eventually flees to Germany. While there, he follows in his father’s footsteps by studying medicine and falls in love with Sarah, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Questioning redemption, love, guilt, and the sins of the father, East of Berlin is a tour de force that follows Rudi’s emotional upheaval as he comes to terms with a frightening past that was never his own.
He Walked through the Fields [הוא הלך בשדות]
Memorial Day for Uri in the fictional kibbutz Gat HaAmakim. A member of the kibbutz tells us about how things have changed, so much so that Uri won't recognize the place. He tells us who Uri was: the first son born in the kibbutz, warrior in the Palmach. Uri’s parents are separating when he returns to the kibbutz from agricultural school; his dad has just returned from a mission abroad, bringing surviving children, over a very rough road via Teheran. Uri meets a young girl, Mika, who was brought by his dad. Mika was a well-educated girl before the war, but has a dubious past. They fall in love and move in together, and the kibbutz is not happy: everyone, including Uri's mom, thinks Uri deserves a better girl. Uri is called into service, and fights with Mika, who is pregnant, although nobody knows. Uri's platoon is ordered to blow up a bridge to stop the British soldiers reaching an illegal ship, and Uri swaps places with the bomber and is wounded badly. Mika is on her way to have an abortion, but when she learns that Uri has died, she keeps the child and makes peace with Uri's mother.
Lady of the Castle [בעלת הארמון]
In 1947, at the end of the war, two emissaries from the Jewish community in Israel are searching for and bringing back Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. They encounter an Eastern European aristocrat who continues to keep a Jewish girl in hiding after the war has ended. They arrive on a stormy night to an old castle, which was used as a Nazi headquarters during the war, but is now a museum. Its previous owner, Count Zabrodski, was allowed to stay as the castle's keeper. They stay the night and discover by accident Lena, a Jewish girl whom Zabrodski hid from the Nazis because he was in love with her. Zabrodski doesn’t tell Lena the war ended two years ago because he doesn’t want her to leave him. Dora and Michael tell her the truth, which she has a hard time accepting. But she is persuaded, and leaves with them to Israel.
Magda and Josef
Adapted by David F. Eliet from Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, this is the true story of a young woman who risked her life to do the right thing when so many others were turning their backs and pretending not to see what was going on around them. Set during the Holocaust, Magda, a young non-Jewish woman, undertakes a perilous journey to secure a document that will help to save the life of the Jewish man she loves.
Meshugah
Set in the 1950s on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Meshugah is a tragicomic portrait of a community of recent Jewish émigrés living in the wake of the Holocaust. When Aaron Greidinger, a struggling novelist and advice columnist, falls in love with the beautiful mistress of a friend from his Warsaw past, dark secrets and bizarre twists threaten to break up the unusual romance. Emily Mann’s adaptation of Singer's love story of lost souls in a world gone meshugah.
Race
Bruckner's Race dramatizes the effects of the rise of Nazism and its anti-Jewish laws on a group of medical students in Germany in the early years of Hitler’s reign. Race dramatizes the love affair between Christian medical student Peter Karlanner and his Jewish girlfriend Helene Marx, a relationship clearly threatened by the Nazis’ racial laws.
Sonia Mushkat [סוניה מושקט]
Lydia and Paula are rich Jewish sisters, living in Hungary. During the war they hide in the basement of their estate, together with Lydia's son, Albert, and a Christian maid named Sonia. Life is extreme in hiding: there are cold, hungry and afraid—feelings that the rich characters are not accustomed to. Truth comes to light, connections and relationships, including those between Sonia's family and the rich Jews, and a love story blooms between the young.
Sophie’s Choice
Based on the novel by William Styron, the opera tells the story of Sophie Zawistowski, a beautiful Polish immigrant now living in the U.S., who, in Auschwitz, was forced to choose between her son and her daughter’s survival. But this is not the only choice she has to make. Having survived the camp, she now has two lovers: Stingo and Nathan. Stingo wants a family with her. Nathan, her schizophrenic boyfriend, asks her to marry him. Sophie is forced once again to decide, but memories of her past choices haunt her, and she takes her final option, suicide.
The American Plan
Lili Adler is a daughter of a wealthy German-Jewish refugee. In the summer of 1960, she meets Nick Lockridge. Lili is intrigued with Nick and thinks of him as her savior. They begin a romantic relationship but Lili’s mother Eva is suspicious of Nick. Eva manipulates the relationship and at its end she is satisfied because “happiness is for others”.
The Jewish Dog
The Jewish Dog is an autobiography of Cyrus, a dog born in mid-1930s into the household of the German-Jewish family Gottlieb. Cyrus is a special dog, unusually sensitive to humans’ emotions and determined to fully comprehend human speech. The novel follows his life and contemplations while he’s making his way through Europe during World War II. Cyrus witnesses the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, and all the love he knows comes from the Gottlieb family.
A Nazi decree forces the family out of their home, and unfortunate events separate them from Cyrus.
Warsaw
Based on the true story of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in which Jewish fighters gave their lives to resist deportation to Nazi concentration camps. It was the first and single largest revolt by Jews during the Holocaust and inspired many other uprisings throughout the ghettos and concentration camps of occupied Europe. The musical tells the story of Roman who is trapped in the ghetto and separated from his gentile fiancée, Ana. The couple struggle to reunite, and Roman leads a group of resistance fighters into a battle to vindicate their community.
You, Fascinating You
A headstrong Jewish ballerina, Margit Wolf, seeking her fortune in 1920s Italy falls for an up-and-coming Italian maestro, Pasquale Frustaci, and inspires the hit love song that earns him the moniker “The Italian Cole Porter.” When Mussolini issues an edict banning foreign Jews from Italy, the ballerina and her maestro are forced to separate. Twenty-two years will pass before they again meet face-to-face.