A new play explores hot button issues about narratives and identities
LENOX – On Thursday, July 10 at 7 p.m., Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and Shakespeare & Company are delighted to provide a group discount to Federation community members for one night only of The Victim, written by Lawrence Goodman and featuring Annette Miller. The play will be followed by a talk-back with Annette Miller, director Daniel Gidron, and local theater expert, Barbara Waldinger.
A successful New York doctor whose racial diversity training has gone horribly wrong. A health aide grappling with racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Holocaust survivor facing her own horror, and finding her way back to love and healing. Three women, three interconnected monologues. Who gets to call herself a victim? Who is the perpetrator? Staged at Shakespeare & Company in 2024 as a reading the Plays in Process series, The Victim by Lawrence Goodman is about identity, our blindness to others, and the human capacity for cruelty and compassion.
Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and Shakespeare & Company. The play will be staged at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street in Lenox. Tickets will be discounted by 20 percent for Berkshire Jewish Federation community – use the code MILLER when calling the theater box office (413.637.3353) or booking online at shakespeare.org.
About The Victim
“Each one of us can see ourselves as ‘the victim,’” says Annette Miller. “Things are happening to me. It’s not my fault. ‘They’ are doing me in.” What Lawrence Goodman gets right in this play, as Miller sees it, is that “each of the three characters, in some way, can also be viewed as doing someone else in.”
When Miller spoke with the BJV in May, the creative team staging The Victim had not yet gone into rehearsals, but the actress says that based on the show’s reception last summer as a work in progress, she has high hopes. “You could hear a pin drop when we finished,” she says. “I just loved the rhythm of the language – it tells the story. That goes so much with Shakespeare & Company – Shakespeare is all in the rhythm. When I do contemporary plays, they are all prose, but this is written very specifically – it’s not rhymed poetry, but it is written in stanzas.”
Another challenge for Miller and her collaborators will be to craft a persona for her character visually – Miller will be onstage the entire time while the other two characters convey different perspectives about events that brought them into conflict, although she will not interact with them as they speak. These monologues will be delivered sequentially, with Miller’s character speaking last about her life and her experience during the Holocaust. “Their fight is about how to take care of my character,” she explains, “by my goodness – if they understood what my character had to go through, would they really be arguing?”
Lawrence Goodman’s play touches on some of hot button issues of the day – white privilege, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and what about the Holocaust is or is not over for the Jewish people. Goodman spoke to the BJV about The Victim in May. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
How did the themes of The Victim come together for you?
One of the things I was hearing from a number of Jews I knew was that they felt that DEI had gone too far. They would say, Jews are victims, too. I was very interested in how we evaluate or assess competing narratives of victimhood. Who gets to call themselves a victim? Why, sometimes, when one group asserts its victimhood, does another group feel that it somehow negates their victimhood? There's this question of white privilege – can Jews have ‘white privilege’? How does the Holocaust affect our supposed or alleged white privilege?
Did you have a developed idea about that, or were your ways of looking at things clarified by the process of writing The Victim?
I think when you write a play, you just have questions, and what gets clarified are the questions, not the answers.
Artistically, how did you decide to structure the play, with each character telling her story rather than interacting with one another?
I wanted it to feel very like an intimate conversation between the characters and the audience. I wanted the characters to come up on stage, tell their stories plainly from the heart, and have the audience assess it. Sometimes there's very good reason to do drama and to do characters interacting, but this just felt, given the issues, given who the characters were, that they should each have their moment in the spotlight to discuss their lives.
DEI has been around for some time and it has become such a part of many institutions. Now, under pressure, many are scaling it back or retreating from DEI altogether. From a Jewish perspective, what do you see as the core issue?
I think we're going through a period as Jews right now, especially American Jews, who trying to situate ourselves in a multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy. What is our place in it? And how do we view our status as victims compared to these other groups? That's the central question of the play. The play is not a debate about DEI – it asks a larger question of how we understand ourselves. I think that's part of what is going on with Israel, too – Israel is very much bounded in connection to the Holocaust. There are Jews who feel, no, the Holocaust is not relevant to what Israel is doing in Gaza, and that a colonial settler paradigm should be used. I think behind those questions are questions about victimhood and being a victim or a perpetrator.
You don't go to a play, I don't think, to get hit over the head with an answer to DEI. Do you know what I'm saying? You read a newspaper or you read a journal or something like that. You go to the theater because it opens up the human dimension of these questions, and that's what I wanted to do.
Does victimhood status have a shelf life, after which you can't say you're a victim anymore – perhaps if you're a member of a certain ethnic group?
It's a question of how you use the Holocaust, how you think of yourself in the shadow of the Holocaust, and, as time passes, how that changes. The Holocaust confers a moral status on Jews, understandably and in many ways justifiably. But it can't be fixed in time forever. Nothing is fixed in time forever. History moves forward. So, we constantly need to assess how this event, which is so enormous, so cataclysmic, so singular, changes our sense of identity and who we are. And yet it does change. You can't reasonably expect it to be the same. I think it's generational, too. Older Jewish Americans have seen it as one of the defining events of Jewish history, of Jewish life, of Jewish intellectual discussion. I think there are younger Jews that I've had discussions with who are like, ‘I don't want to live in the shadow of the Holocaust. I want my Judaism to be something different.’
We have to honor the event and try to make sense of an event that's very hard to make sense of. I think that's one of the things the play struggles with. How do you extract a moral meaning from this event and make it part of your identity and what does it mean? There's the event itself, there's the memory of the event, and then there's the story you tell about the event. And those are all three different things.
How did you feel your way into writing a character, the health aide, who was coming from a non-Jewish perspective about these issues?
I approached it with a lot of humility and eagerness. I had conversations with people who are from the Dominican Republic and learned as much as I could about the country. I tried to imagine someone who knows very little about Judaism, has their own history of trauma, and ask how they might bring that to a perspective on the Holocaust, and how it might feel to work for someone who's insistent on the primacy of the Holocaust. How do you begin to compare Jewish suffering with suffering in the DR? Do you know what I'm saying? Is it body counts? That seems crazy. Is it the innocent people killed? Is it the way they were killed? How do you even begin to make sense of them? This character has to make sense of that and is also struggling with the fact that the Jewish person is wealthier than her is her boss, so has power over her, which adds another dimension to it. To some extent, for her, Jews are white, and no different than other white people. So that changes your perspective on the Holocaust, too.
I think when you come to the theater, you’ll hear three women who've had rich, complicated, controversial life experiences talk about the issues that all of us are dealing with at this moment in this country and talk from the heart about them. It's not abstract. It's funny. Life is funny. It's absurd. That's part of it, too. It's not a lecture. It's ‘Hey, this is what I've been through. What do you think?’
The Victim will be presented from June 19 through July 20 at Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre. The Federation discount will only be available for the performance on July 10.