‘Bent’ Presents A Story Of Human Survival On A New Milford Stage

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — The pink triangle which is now a familiar symbol of gay pride and survival had its origin in the Nazi concentration camps. The inmates wore color coded badges to reflect the particular nature of their social undesirability: yellow stars for Jews, brown triangles for gypsies, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, red for political prisoners and trade unionists, green for ordinary criminals, and pink for homosexuals.

Martin Sherman’s gripping drama Bent, now on state at TheatreWorks New Milford, makes the point that this last class of prisoners constituted the absolute bottom of the degraded pecking order that prevailed in the camps.

Despised and abused by both the guards and their fellow inmates, few homosexuals lived long enough to be liberated at the end of the war. Those who did were unable to speak freely about their experience because the law forbidding “unnatural behavior” remained on the books in Germany until the 1970s.

Mr Sherman’s play, which premiered in London in 1979, broke ground by revealing to the world this particular aspect of Holocaust history. Under Joe Longo’s capable direction on the current New Milford production, Bent remains on one level a “Holocaust play,” with the entire second act taking place in Dachau, seen through an ominous wall of barbed wire.

However, while it uses the Holocaust as its setting, Bent is really a play about personal relationships and the struggle of one man to overcome his own self-hatred and come to terms with his own sexuality.

Todd Yocher is Max, the black sheep son of a wealthy family who immerses himself in the decadent and dissolute world of 1930s Berlin cabaret society, seeking pleasure and escape in the non-stop binge of alcohol, cocaine and one night stands with pretty boys. Although he lives with Rudy (Todd Santa Maria), a timid dancer who loves him, Max declares that he himself is incapable of loving anyone.

When the “Night of the Long Knives” (Hitler’s purge that got rid of his close friend and second-in-command, Ernest Roehm in the name of eliminating homosexuality in the Nazi ranks) leads to the wholesale persecution and arrest of known homosexuals, Max and Rudy are forced to leave their apartment and go on the run. A meeting with Max’s uncle reveals a bit of his background: his family would have tolerated his homosexuality if he had kept it secret — married an eligible bride and enjoyed his “rented boys” discreetly on the side (just like Uncle Freddie does).

While Max tries to work a deal that will obtain false papers and tickets to Amsterdam for both Rudy and himself, Rudy does day labor to earn food for them. It is Rudy’s trusting confidence in his fellow workers that leads to their betrayal and arrest.

While the first act is episodic in time and place, moving from cabaret to apartment to park bench to forest to a prisoner’s train, the entire second act is set in a tiny corner of the camp, where, seen through the barbed wire strung across the stage, Max and a fellow prisoner, Horst, continually move a pile of rocks from one side to the other, in a form of work designed, according to Max, to drive them crazy.

Bill Hughes, the artistic director of TheatreWorks who is also responsible for the set, gives a powerful performance as Horst, a gentle, wryly philosophical older man who was arrested for signing a petition asking that the ban against homosexuality be lifted.

What makes this a strong and complex drama is that while it is set in a concentration camp and purports to be a historical contribution to knowledge of the Holocaust, it is just as much a play about dealing with the psychological alienation imposed by any society that views homosexuality with fear and contempt.

Taught by his family that his longings were unspeakable, subject to popular scorn and ridicule and labeled by law a pervert, it is understandable that Max views himself with self-hatred and adopts a code of heartless selfishness. That he can rise above this emotional desert is a tribute to the human capacity for endurance and growth, even in the most destructive environments.

The Holocaust, with its systematic, government-sanctioned persecution, happened more than fifty years ago, in another country. However, so long as homosexuals are forced to live in fear of abuse, whether it is by drunken thugs in Wyoming or the vituperative outpourings of bigots in Brookfield, a play like Bent has a message for us all.

(Performances continue Friday and Saturday evenings until May 12 at the TheatreWorks building, 5 Brookside Avenue in New Milford.

Due to adult themes and situations portrayed, Bent is not a play to bring children to.)