The Victim
Shakespeare and Company, Lenox, Mass.
Written by Lawrence Goodman.
Directed by Daniel Gidron.
“They will always win.”
Three women sit in semi-darkness against the rear wall of the stage, a wall with dozens of old photos and oddly shaped mirrors hanging prominently on it. The women emerge, one-by-one, to tell us their stories, play out scenes from their pasts. They speak in monologue, never hearing a response from either of the others, yet involving them in the stories they tell. An awkward form, or forum, at best yet one that is remarkably effective in the case of this new play being given its world premiere production by Shakespeare and Company. Its listed running time of one hour and thirty minutes stretched out to almost two hours at the performance I saw and it is a painful period of time, no matter how long it lasts: painful for its content, not its delivery which was exquisite.
Each of these women considers herself to be a victim of her special, specific circumstances. The challenge to the audience is to decide who is the real victim of this tale of crime, or torture, or horrors. Is a hired caregiver who leaves her job to satisfy an unhappy relative and is fired from her much needed income source the victim? Is a single, professional woman with a difficult job and a child, caring for an aged mother alone the victim? Is a Holocaust survivor who watched her entire family die and lived to tell it the victim? Or is it someone else? Each of us must make up our own minds on this score in this play and so we are as active a participant in the play as are the three actresses on stage.
Annette Miller plays Ruth, the holocaust survivor. Hers is the third monologue, the final and ultimate story of torture, horror and mutual misalliance. Ruth has been creating journal in which to record her memories of how things were and there is little of joy in it. Her childhood in a small Ukrainian town, not big enough to appear on any map, has given her very few happy memories. Invaded and then wiped out by the Nazis she alone has survived to share these brutal and difficult thoughts. She has never spoken to her own family about her trials and her tribulations, so this book she is writing will be her last word on earth on any subject and it will explain her to her descendants, especially to her daughter.
The story she tells involves a fourth woman who cannot speak for herself, so Ruth tells her story as well. Her name is Olga. She is not a pleasant woman at all, but her life, and her performance in life, informs Ruth’s attitude and lifestyle. Olga is Ruth’s protector and her tormenter and her own lifestyle has been a direct outcome of their relationship. It is a terrible picture to live with for so many years. But is it possible, when all is considered, that Olga is “The Victim?” Personally that was my conclusion.
Daphne, Ruth’s daughter, lives a life so completely different from Ruth. She is a good woman, pampered and preened, allowed an education and the opportunities that provides her. A single mother with a career she hasn’t had the time or inclination to move into a very positive relationship. Quick to judge others, her mother included, she ventures into the sort of loneliness that only the well-educated seem to tolerate. Stephanie Clayman, who delivers the first monologue, is then required to sit in her upstage chair for over an hour listening to the other women grieve over their life choices. Is she, then, the unintended “victim” of these peculiar circumstances? Clayman does a fine job setting the scene for what’s to come. Her twenty-eight minute story is the shortest but it makes its point with a singular clarity that only the professional personality could engage. And she was engaging. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Yvette King plays Maria, a professional caregiver, not a nurse, who is raising a single-parent son with problems of his own, and living with her mother who is a constant source of dissatisfaction. Her personal turmoil is enough to make her into an unwarranted and incidental “victim” of life’s indignities. King is engaging and delightful in this role, moving from light comedy to light tragedy and back again. Her story takes longer to tell than Daphne’s story, but is nowhere near as long as Ruth’s considerable history.
Miller’s Ruth is the principal character in this play. Confined, primarily, to a wheelchair she gives us the true tale of the most unpleasant sort – the destruction of an entire race of people and her solo confinement in the home of the enemy, a home which gives her solace and security but which also provided the lasting consequences of its own. Hers is the longest solo sequence of the play and she is up to the challenges.
Somehow director Daniel Gidron has kept these stories alive for the audience. Goodman’s writing is so clean and direct that the director’s job is mainly to keep the audience awake and alert to these situations. These two men have brought us three women (or four) whose personal and secret awakenings make theater deliver what it always should, reality heightened to create understanding and honesty. These are not easy challenges but Goodman and Gidron have met them with talent and skill. They even made me overcome my dislike for monologue plays. I was truly swept away with this one, swept into it, kept alert, kept inquisitive and kept entertained.
Govane Lohbauer has costumed these women appropriately and we know them even before they speak. Erika Johnson has let them wander into and out of light as needed. Amy Altadonna has provided sound design that permits memory and reality to blend. The setting, designed by John Musall requires the audience to wander up to the rear wall to see the pictures posted there. They aid the audience in realizing what they’ve heard for nearly two hours.
I would recommend this play, but if truth that is painful is not your thing take a tranquilizer before you go. There are hard things to hear in these stories well told.
The Victim plays in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare and Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Massachusetts through July 20. For information and tickets go to Shakespeare.org.
