Meta Rec: synecdochic on Anti-Semitism
One of the best, most well articulated and restrained pieces I've ever read on this subject.
The Past Didn't Go Anywhere by synecdochic
Quote:
When I was eighteen years old, headed off to theatre school and convinced of my own competence in all things and all matters, I entered a dramatic monologue in the state forensics tournament: one of Zillah's monologues from Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day. I didn't win the statewide, but the judges commended me for choosing a difficult piece and doing it justice in a way that, they said, no eighteen-year-old in 1995 should have been able to do. I had to work my ass off for that piece, because it drew heavily on the history that we just flat out weren't taught -- but even then, I recognized the power inherent in the words Kushner had written.
The play is set in the last days of Weimar Berlin, interspersed with present-day (at the time -- Kushner was writing in the late 80s) pieces from a young, politically-paranoid, probably queer, Jewish, American expatriate (living in Germany, even) woman who is very, very, very fucking pissed. Like Kushner is pissed. Like all of us should be pissed.
