Sense of Decency
Jack Broder’s North Coast Rep-commissioned dramatic adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s nonfiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist opens with Hemingway’s famous line, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” It’s a bit curious, given what comes immediately after: a man making reference to a magic pill that will make him disappear. Broken or killed? Given that the man is Dr. Douglas McGlashan Kelley, the military doc tasked with assessing Nazi propagandist-in-chief Herman Göring before he is set to be tried for war crimes at Nuremberg, it’s tempting to wonder why Broder didn’t go with Nietzsche’s “If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Because that’s very much what’s going on here: Kelley’s looking for book material from Göring, while Göring is looking for…something else from Kelley. (For a certain sort of actor, there must be a dark sort of relish in rendering an infamous Nazi as not only human but also charismatic and even sympathetic. Frank Corrado holds the stage much like Anthony Hopkins held the screen in Silence of the Lambs. His grinning glee during his running joke about various nationalities is positively infectious — “One Englishman is an idiot, two Englishmen is a club, three Englishmen is an Empire!”) The trouble comes when he leaves the scene: Kelley, while played by Brendan Ford with the earnest sense of decency referenced in the title, is simply no match for Göring dramatically. The latter was the brilliant architect of a world-shaking monstrosity, while the former is worried about his career and his mother’s opinion of him. The play wisely brings in his wife Dukie (a wide-eyed Lucy Davenport) to do some relatable suffering — the poor woman, so able to advise her husband on how to talk to a bad man, so unable to advise him about his own badness. But then, she wasn’t the one who gazed into the abyss.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, May 12, 2024
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm & 7pm |
| Wednesdays, 8pm |
| Thursdays, 8pm |
| Fridays, 8pm |
| Saturdays, 8pm |