In a year when the fate of refugees in Europe has dominated headlines, a play about European Jews struggling to make their way in America after the Holocaust should hit home hard. But Alan Lester Brooks’ “A Splintered Soul,” though awash in good intentions and given a handsome staging with ARLA Productions under Keira Fromm’s direction, doesn’t resolve what it wants to be.
And that’s a shame. For one thing, we don’t have an overabundance of plays that show the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust on survivors in America — though there are several that show children of Holocaust survivors coming to terms with the horror their parents survived. And as noted, in a world awash with refugees from contemporary atrocities, a play about the tensions between survivors and the well-meaning but clueless ministrations of those in the new country should be riveting.
But it’s not. And that’s not the fault of the cast in Fromm’s production, led by Craig Spidle as Rabbi Kroeller, who lost his family in Poland, fought in the Jewish resistance and now hosts a support group in San Francisco for fellow Jewish survivors. These include Gerta (Eliza Stoughton) and Mordechi (Nik Kourtis), who survived the camps through sexual slavery, and Sol (Matt Mueller), who made the iron doors used on the gas chambers. There is also a mysterious brother and sister, Harold (Curtis Edward Jackson) and Elisa (Jessica Kingsdale), who come to Rabbi Kroeller with a tale of continued enslavement in the new world.
The group is monitored by a Jewish judge (Dev Kennedy), who leads the resettlement campaign for the refugees and would appreciate less defiance and more assimilation from the new arrivals.
That seems to be the most interesting aspect of Brooks’ play: How can we expect people who have seen unimaginable horror to forget what happened and get with the program in their new country? But by tossing in awkward references to the future fate of Palestinians in Israel and the paranoia about communism in postwar America, Brooks tries to tie too many issues of victimization and prejudice together without giving enough breathing room to any of them. The Harold/Elisa storyline in particular feels strained and melodramatic — and since it’s the spark to the story’s most important twist, that’s a problem.
However, particularly in Spidle’s performance, one sees the unbearable loss that even a man who prides himself as a fighter carries in his soul — splintered and suffused with grief and torn from the moorings of moral certitude.
2 STARS
When: Through May 29
Where: Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.
Tickets: $36 at 773-327-5252 or stage773.com
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.