Lebensraum

All too often, the Boston theater scene serves up more than the most enthusiastic reviewer can possibly take in, and excellent productions fall through the cracks or are seen late in their (often too-brief) runs. Every season I find myself lamenting I didn't see this or that, and groaning almost as loudly that I wish I had seen such-and-such a play on its press night rather than a few days before it ended, the better to get the word out.

Such is the case with Happy Medium Theatre's fifth-season closer, Israel Horovitz's jaunty, yet haunting, play "Lebensraum."

Horovitz envisions a Germany of the year 2000 that wishes to start the new millennium with a clean slate and a conscience purged of guilt of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. The chancellor (R. Nelson Lacey) issues a general offer for six million Jews to immigrate to Germany and become "new citizens" that will restore Europe's Jewish culture. His offer ignites an instant, and ferocious, firestorm in which a liberal academic leaps to his feet as though possessed, screaming "Heil Hitler!" and a gentle rabbi counsels his synagogue on the need for Jewish people to return to the scene where they were made the victims of one of history's most heinous crimes. Both men are murdered on the spot. Clearly, the ghosts of the past are not yet laid to rest, and neither is the genocidal demon that gnaws at the human heart with envy, hate, greed, and fevered bloodlust.

But there is always hope for change, and hope to do better. Even as German workers decry the plan to bring six million new citizens into their nation, giving jobs to the newcomers where too many Germans have none, Mike Linsky (Lacey again), an ethnic (and not very religious) Jew living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, decides that his life as a long-term unemployed fisherman in the United States is going nowhere and a fresh start in Germany couldn't lead to anything worse. His wife Lizzy (Audrey Lynn Sylvia) is skeptical, and their fifteen-year-old son Sammy (Michael Underhill) is positively against the idea. But go they do, and they immediately become a "model" for the "new citizens," both media sensation and political poker chip.

All won't be fairy tale happiness, of course, and we know this from the depth of the social divisions that instantly become evident. We also know it from the hypocritical way the chancellor and his people treat the very first "new citizens," a French couple who are both gay and married. (Horrors!!) A comic sidebar involving two Holocaust survivors living in Australia -- one taciturn, the other vivacious in the shadow of a tragic history -- twists into a subplot about revenge, but also a meditation on the perversities of the human psyche, and how the persecuted and the persecutors need one another in a way as deep, intimate, and primal as any pair of lovers.

But it's the emergence of an aggressive Jewish faction, secretly organized by Israelis wishing to ensure that modern Germany will not become the killing field that the concentration camps were, that tips the balance: Just as the "new citizen" program is about to devolve into widespread chaos, the "new Jews" reveal their existence, their muscle, and their determination. Tragedy has already occurred -- but have the "new Jews" prevented more of the same? Or have they only guaranteed that an eventual pushback will erupt, all the bloodier for the delay?

Horovitz doesn't want to answer all these questions. He wants us to think about the roots of human evil, and the evil done by human institutions. His message is that history is fractious and brutal as a byproduct of individual selfishness; what doesn't concern our own lives and immediate families is of little importance to us, be it the suffering of others or even monumental atrocity done in our collective name. The ideal of a loftier humanity hovers there before us, but all too often remains out of reach: Our feet are mired in the sludge of the day-to-day, grinding realities tied to economics and policies centered around who does the work versus who reaps the rewards.

This is a play that knows it's a fantasy and wishes to underscore the fact from the start. The three actors jump in and out of a variety of roles, including the role of omniscient narrator. Many scenes introduce characters and settings the play visits only once, and just long enough to sketch in some sort of dramatic new development; sometimes, "Lebensraum" seems more like a cluster of story beats on index cards than something scripted.

That, too, is a device that's deliberately chosen -- hence the sketched-out nature of the narrative, the deliberate use of minimal props and a cast of only three actors. Horovitz invites us to a theater of the mind, where events of global consequence -- and chains of globally unfolding repercussions -- can be evaluated. Horovitz creates this vast canvas through the act of scaling everything down. In the right hands, it's scarily effective.

Happy Medium's production brings the right people to the right roles. Lacey's sensitivity and humanity filters through some of the play's most extreme characters: Chancellor and kindly rabbi as well as disaffected German worker and leader of an "anti-new-citizen" group, finding center and balance in the character of Mike Linsky. Michael Underhill's brawny frame serves to hint at the adolescent turmoil Sammy deals with as he's uprooted from his American home and brought to Germany, where he falls in love with Anna (she's the daughter of the anti-immigrant movement's leader). Underhill also plays various figures in the German government, as well as the "liberal" college professor and intellectual whose astonishing, gut-level response to the chancellor's idea is to dash off a Nazi salute.

Audrey Lynn Sylvia proves just as nimble as she switches at full throttle from one role to the next. Like her chameleonic counterparts, Sylvia is tasked with shifting from one persona to the next in a blink; one moment she portrays an extremist television commentator who sounds like something off Fox News; the next, she's Lizzy, the supportive but worried wife of Mike the fisherman; then she's Anna Giesling, a student horrified to learn that the Holocaust was more than just a group of madmen who forced murder and mayhem onto German society from the top down, but was, rather, an expression of the German people as a whole. (Daniel Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is not exactly cited here, but one feels its gravitational influence as though the tome had taken up residence right nearby.)

It's as Anna that Sylvia is most affecting: She takes Sammy under her wing, and seeks from him that privileged pastime of teens everywhere, "the kissing." She's just as vulnerable as she is iron-willed and smart, which makes Anna, as much as Sammy, an anchor of the play as a whole.

Brett Marks serves double duty as scenic designer and director; the latter requires utmost flexibility, and the latter meticulous specificity. Marks handles both requirements. Costumer Erica Desautels does major work here, since it's the clothing that helps make each of the approximately 40 characters in the play, from the shawl-wrapped elderly Holocaust survivor Sylvia briefly plays to Sammy's baseball cap. The show makes good use of dialect coach Charles Linshaw, with the various accents acting as the auditory equivalent of Desautels' raiment.

Overall, Happy Medium understands this material in the way one suspects Horovitz wishes it to be understood: A parable, yes, full of dramatic invention that belies and challenges our common notion of reality. (Then again, so does the Holocaust.) But not a parable meant to encourage us to remember; we have many books, plays, and films to help us remember. What this play wants, and what HMT works to deliver, is that we understand even a fragment of historic forces so colossal and overbearing as to short-circuit rational process.

As I say, I wish I'd seen the production and gotten the review written sooner. At this point, with the play finishing its run this coming weekend, the main point to impart is this: Don't even spend the time debating Horovitz's parable, controversial as it's willing to be. Just go and see what HMT does with it.

"Lebensraum" continues through May 24 at the Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont Street in Boston. For tickets and more information, please visit http://www.happymediumtheatre.com