New City Lets The Last Letter Speak For Itself

What are you supposed to say about a Holocaust play? The Last Letter at New City Theatre (Fri. & Sat. 8 p.m., tix $15) is good, it's worth seeing, but in a strange way that's not saying much, because you're talking about the story itself, not the performance. But then again, that may say as much about New City's artistic choices as anything: sometimes, less is more, and revealing the story is mostly a matter of getting out of the way.

The joy audiences get (if you can call it that) from a Holocaust story is mostly due to how charmingly black-and-white it is: the innocent are so innocent, evil is so evil, that it's reassuring to know that sometimes there is just plain right and wrong. Holocaust narratives get their power from the contrast of essential human dignity and pointless violence and cruelty, and the actor's task when playing a victim is to avoid overstating the case. The story makes its own points; the actor's just a medium.

In The Last Letter, Elizabeth Kenny generally does a marvelous job recounting, almost matter-of-factly, the final weeks of a mother's life through a letter to her son. There are times when she reaches trying to make a big, profound point when a simpler approach would have sufficed, such as when her character, middle-aged ophthalmologist Anna Semyonovna, offhandedly mentions where the Jews are being marched off to, noting that more than likely she'll be buried in a mass grave there.

But other moments carry all the heft on their own, and when Kenny lets her character be more surprised than philosophical, the play just plain hurts to watch because the heartbreaking things are so painfully quotidian during the Holocaust. Perhaps the best example is the story of Anna finally moving to the ghetto; neighbors, friends, patients, and acquaintances have all turned on her or simply stare on numbly, while a cold-hearted prick she once treated--the last person she ever expected to stand up for her--turns out to help her carry her things, supporting her on the way, and offering whatever help he can. (He's the one to whom she gives the letter.) It's a sort of Boo Radley-type twist, but Kenny's expression of genuine surprise is so affecting that few eyes will be left dry in the house.

Peter Brook, the great British director, made clear the essential power of the Holocaust narrative in an anecdote from The Empty Space. He gave a student a monologue from Henry V where a messenger lists the many dead, and the student predictably flopped with pretentious, halting language amidst titters from his classmates. Then Brook gave the student a monologue from Peter Weiss' The Investigation, about Auschwitz, listing the names of the dead. The difference in both actor performance and audience response was palpable, because the Holocaust comes with its own profundity, its own truth. Kenny serves that truth well in The Last Letter.