But now I’m sitting here in the theater watching the tech gods work their magic- and I’m flabbergasted. I’m gobsmacked. I’m utterly floored.

It’s gorgeous: innovative and evocative, witty and frightening, and so is the lighting… and I’m sure that what I haven’t seen is. Just as amazing.

The danger of being the lyricist, spending all day counting syllables on a laptop, is that you forget how small a part of the overall picture you are. Being here now, seeing the production really happen- it’s real: or realer than real, since musical theater is such a heightened distillation of real life. All these artists- actors, singers, musicians, designers, costumers, videographers, technicians, choreographers, directors.

I feel like the guy who gets out of Plato’s cave and sees the real world for the first time.

I don’t want to say anything else about what the production looks like, because I don’t want to give anything away.

But it’s worth the wait.

And the answer– at least, our answer– is that people are funny.  Stripped of possessions, privacy and dignity, what was left to the inhabitants of Terezin but their senses of humor?

Terrible things happened in Terezin– but between and around them, people still lived their lives: they attended classes and made art, gossiped and courted; and they laughed, sometimes wryly, sometimes bitterly, at the absurdity of their condition.  Those laughs were often the small acts of subversion that got them through.  People, wherever you put them, are people; they’ll always find something to laugh about.

Audiences often tell us that they were surprised by the humor in Signs of Life– and we’re always glad to hear it- but it would be much more surprising if our show wasn’t funny.  In the end, laughter may be the most universal sign of life.

I pondered, preparing my brew,

Has it wandered, alone and uncared for

To where gold filters go when they’re blue?

Is it here, by the stale lapsang souchong?

Is it there, under yesterday’s bread?

I love you, my gold coffee filter,

But I’ll have to use paper instead

Oh yes

I’ll have to use paper instead;

It’s true

I’ll have to use paper instead.

And here in the New World, in Brooklyn, Howard Zinn would have been about 20, working alongside my grandfather in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, when the events in Signs of Life took place; later, he enlisted and served in the war as a bombardier.

Howard Zinn; 1922-2010

Zinn died Wednesday at the age of 87, after a long life of scholarship, writing, teaching, activism and struggle.  I don’t have the space here to tell his story; one good place to learn it is his New York Times obituary; his autobiography You Can’t Stay Neutral on a Moving Train is another.  But maybe the best thing to do is go read his seminal and revolutionary A Peoples’ History of the United States and see the passion with which Zinn told the other American History– the stories of the excluded, marginalized and prematurely silenced voices that, until his book activated the intellect and conscience of new generations of history students, remained largely unheard.

Zinn was a truth-teller, a teacher and a warrior, and his light never dimmed.   One of my students saw him speak last year;   Zinn was 86 at the event, but as Elyna said, Once you saw him on stage, you forget how old he was; he was shining. “

Generations of heroes have died, killed in wars and death camps, strikes and plagues and struggles for freedom; but some heroes survive and continue to inspire.

If there are any saints in the world, Zinn was one of them.

Should Nazis Sing?

In the broadest sense, history has already answered  this question.  Nazis sang;  if we are to believe the movies, they did it with lusty Teutonic pride, steins hoisted high.

But when Peter Ullian, Joel Derfner and I grappled with this issue, we were trying to decide the rules for writing Signs of Life.   And we pretty much agreed from the beginning: no singing Nazis- for the following reasons:

1. Singing Nazis are entirely too reminiscent of  The Producers, a comparison we wanted to discourage; and
2. Characters who sing demand our understanding, if not our sympathy.

To explain:  in Cabaret, Kander and Ebb give us the brilliant anthem, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” and when the first few words of that hymn to the Fatherland are sung, unaccompanied, by a clear tenor voice, it makes your hair stand on end.  If there were a Tony given for “Best Song for a Nazi,” it would win the lifetime achievement award.  But because it’s an anthem,we know that the words didn’t originate from the characters: we accept the premise that it’s a pre-existing song that brings them together as a community.

But when a character is alone and sings, it usually means that they’re in a state of heightened emotion– and thus, a state of heightened reflection.  It doesn’t mean that they’re being honest with themselves– but they think they are.  Good writers can get a lot of mileage out of this– some of the greatest musical theater songs get  their zetz from the ironic distance between the character’s self-understanding and what they inadvertently reveal about themselves as they sing  (this doesn’t have to be musical theater–Randy Newman once said that the characters in his songs are all assholes, but they don’t know it).  Really great songs in this vein sometimes allow the characters to “overhear themselves” as Harold Bloom puts it, and thus to come to a new insight.

So– did we really want to give a Nazi the chance to get this honest with himself?  Did we want to dignify that voice– or even let it flirt with redemption?

When Simon Wiesenthal was an inmate in the Lemberg concentration camp, he was summoned to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier.  The dying man, consumed with guilt for his acts of mass murder, seeks the forgiveness of a Jew;  Wiesenthal, after hearing the soldier’s confession, is unable to give him what he seeks.  Years later, Wiesenthal wrote his story down and sent it to an array of philosophers, theologians and authors, asking them to consider what he should have done under the circumstances.  The book The Sunflower is the result:  the first half  is Wiesenthal’s story; the second is the collection of essays that he got in response.  To a great degree, the responses are split along religious lines: Christians, with their deeply-held belief in the possibility of redemption, felt that Wiesenthal should have honored the soldier’s contrition and forgiven him.  Jews, for the most part, felt that Wiesenthal not only shouldn’t have offered forgiveness, but that he was actually unable to do so, since Judaism says that atonement is only possible when the perpetrator personally seeks the forgiveness of his victim.  Since the Jews that the soldier had wronged were now dead, forgiveness was an impossibility.

Considering whether to let our Nazi characters sing, I felt a sudden kinship with Wiesenthal.   We were considering how to give voice to the honest reflections of SS officers.  Yes, I know, Nazis were human– but then again, those humans were Nazis.  Did we really want to give voice to their deepest conflicts?  And if we did, would anyone want to hear them?

And why were clearly selling ourselves on this entirely distasteful idea?

But the short end of the stick ain’t nothing—Jews did give the world three noteworthy beasties: baby-stealing Lilith (now an icon of Jewish feminism); the vengeful spirit the Dybbuk; and The Golem.

A Genuine Jewish Badass

A genuine Jewish badass, a Golem is a giant man of clay, created to protect the Jews in moments of great crisis.  There are records of several golems in Jewish folklore, but the most famous is the Golem of Prague, said to have been created by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in the late 16^th Century.   As the story goes, Rabbi Loew’s golem was prodigiously powerful– and grew larger every day; one version of the tale ends with the Rabbi crushed beneath the monolith his creation had become.  Golems have shambled through everything from Dungeons and Dragons  to the X-Files and Hellboy; but the Golem of Prague remains the most potent version of the story, and as Signs of Life is a musical about Czech Jews in mortal danger, it seemed inevitable that the Golem of Prague should show up somewhere in the show.

But where?  Though I suggested having a character actually build a golem (thankfully, my collaborators dismissed this idea), we finally used the story to replace an Act One comedy number  where the characters imagined what Madagascar would be like if it became a Jewish resettlement colony (we didn’t make that up- the Nazis had at one time considered it as a solution to the Jewish Problem).  The story would be told as a play-within-a-play, a number that the Jews would perform for the Red Cross when they came to inspect the camp.  Sounded easy and fun to write– the Golem of Prague is a relatively straightforward tale, and I’ve always had a sweet tooth for the heightened theatricality of story theater.  No problem.

Golem= the big guy on the left.

Something like a dozen fully different attempts later, the task didn’t seem so easy- or fun.  Either the telling was too simple or not simple enough; the tone was ponderous- except when it was campy.  Should the Golem sing?  Should he dance?   Were the jokes landing?  Were they even jokes?

Maybe we should have cut the number entirely- but something was happening that made that increasingly difficult to do.  The Golem had been written into Signs of Life for a single song; like Rabbi Loew’s golem, however, it was growing, making appearances in other songs, taking on significance.  After all– what better symbol for art made under oppression than a golem- a sculpture built to strike at the oppressor?

But I, for one, was starting to feel like Rabbi Loew, about to be crushed under my own creation…