ccSCOOP PICK: JUDGMENT DAY

William Parker

ccSCOOP Arts

06-28-10 - 1:58 p.m. - Any creative being who dared to function creatively during the Third Reich had to measure expression against survival or total destruction. Those who, creatively speaking, bore witness met horrible ends, like Hans Fallada, the author of the superb Every Man Dies Alone, dead in an asylum two years after the war ended. Ödön von Horváth, an Austro-Hungarian playwright, was in trouble with the authorities from the beginning of the regime but remained determined to observe the dehumanization of the German people at firsthand. He wrote Judgment Day in 1937 in Vienna (the last of his plays to be performed in his lifetime) and escaped to Paris en route to America immediately after the Anschluss. He died under the most macabre circumstances imaginable, an absurdist playwright's dream: he was struck by lightning outside a cinema on the Champs-Elysees in 1938 after attending a screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Judgment Day is set in a train station in a provincial German town populated by petit bourgeoise citizens and the degree of Schadenfreude felt by these citizens against feelings of guilt and notions of moral responsibility promises to be explored. Translated by playwright Christopher Hampton (he previously adapted von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods for both stage and film), Judgment Day was a hit last year at London's Almeida Theatre and promises to be the must-see play of this summer season.

Fisher Center

Bard College

July 14 thru 25