Tags: Vienna

Heldenplatz

Bernhard, in three scenes, deals with the reverberations of a professor committing suicide by jumping from his apartment in Heldenplatz: the same square into which, 50 years earlier, Nazis marched to mark their takeover of Austria. Bernhard implies that Vienna is still haunted by its past. The professor’s housekeeper and brothers describe the continuing anti-Semitism in Vienna. In the final scene, at a family dinner the professor’s wife hears “Sieg Heil” coming from outside her window in the square.

Mein Kampf

A grotesque style comedy, which takes place in Vienna in the years before the First World War and dramatizes Hitler’s life in a men’s hostel. The play comedically represents his failed career as an artist and the development of his early anti-Semitism and his ironic relationship with a Jewish Bible salesman, Schlomo Herzl, who thinks he is protetecting Hitler from Death, when she is really coming to anoint him as her earthly leader.

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.

The Great Hope

In the Austrian capital, following the Anschluss, the Reich's occupation of that country, a young female who has distant Jewish relatives, decides that she will wear the yellow Star of David that her Jewish friends are required by Nazi law to wear but she is not.

The Singing Forest

A play about gay history comparing Nazi Vienna in the 30s and celebrity-intoxicated New York, Freud appears as a friend in Vienna. The Riemans are your typical American family: they haven’t spoken to each other in decades. Severed by deeply buried secrets from the Holocaust, these endearing individuals are desperate to stay out of contact with each other. Their story takes you on a passage from today’s world of Starbucks, celebrity and therapy to Freud’s inner circle in Vienna and to Paris at the end of World War II.

The Tattooed Man Tells All

A one-man show that takes place in a studio apartment in a public housing project in Vienna, circa 1975. At one point the old man pulls his old zebra-striped camp uniform out of the closet and insists that the interviewer try it on for size. The uniform becomes a life-sized marionette. Man and marionette change places, the marionette becomes the protagonist’s former self and the protagonist himself takes on the role of the tormentor.

Vienna by the Sea [וינה על הים]

A group of Viennese Jews meet once a year in a motel by the sea, and ignore the rise of the Nazi party. The vacation is interrupted by the arrival of David, a regular guest, who has been imprisoned in Dachau for a year. He tells them about his experiences at Dachau and informs them Austria has surrendered to Hitler, but they refuse to believe.