STAGE REVIEW : ‘INVESTIGATION’: A HOLOCAUST TRIAL BY IRE

“I made their stay as pleasant as possible.”

“I enjoyed an unusually cordial relationship with the prisoners.”

“I had my duty to do.”

“I only looked on from the outside.”

“I can’t really remember.”

So goes the testimony in Peter Weiss’ “The Investigation,” at the Megaw Theatre, taken from the record of a 1963-64 German investigation into the Auschwitz death camp. Those in charge of the camp tell us that they don’t remember, or were only obeying orders (it was wartime, after all) or were actually doing the best they could to help the prisoners . . . within reason.

What hypocrites, we think, watching these “good Germans” snivel and bluster at the Megaw. If we were in these people’s shoes, we would at least face up to what we had done. But then, as Americans, we wouldn’t have been in their shoes. We wouldn’t have tolerated the death camps on the edge of town. We would have smelled the inhumanity, the vileness. But there’s something in the German character. . . .

If that’s the reaction that director Michael Fuller wanted, this production is a success. Certainly it’s timely, opening the very night after PBS had shown those unspeakable documentary films of the death camps: unspeakable, but somehow necessary to speak about. Weiss’ play, dated 1966, shows a way to do this, and the Megaw is to be honored for reviving it.

But Fuller’s staging is unfortunate. It makes a myth out of the Holocaust rather than presenting it as an event that actually happened to people not unlike you and me, and which could conceivably happen again. Its Nazis are all monsters, or former monsters. Its victims are all saints, even when testifying against themselves. The result is unreality and, after a while, to be blunt--boredom.

The material is graphic enough, God knows. We hear in detail what a “client” (the euphemism is typical) at Auschwitz would see and smell, from the urine-soaked hay of the arriving cattle cars to the final shrieking panic when the showers started to hiss gas. Faces surface and disappear, often the faces of children, as when a commandant leads a trusting little girl by the hand to a wall and briskly shoots her.

We hear about certain “experiments” on human flesh--the horse meat issued for this purpose been “eaten by the guards.” We hear more than is decent to hear, and we are prompted to shove it away. Fuller’s actors, alas, make it easy to do this. Rather than simply telling us what happened, with now and then an indication of the strain that accompanies presenting these painful memories to strangers, too often these actors turn their stories into spoken arias, the more emotional the better.

Rather than hearing testimony, we feel we’re watching some kind of acting demonstration. The intention, presumably, is to keep the evening theatrical; to avoid boring us with words words words. But read “The Investigation” and see how potent those words are with no actors at all to give them voice. It’s a pity that director Fuller didn’t ask his actors to follow Weiss’ preface: “The variety of experiences can, at most, be indicated, by a change of voice and bearing.”

The effect should be that of men and women trying to speak calmly under duress, not of people trying to convince themselves that they have had an experience. It’s particularly unfortunate in a play that invites the viewer to do some real thinking about the experience of the death camps--for example, about what they tell us about the reluctance of the civilized man and woman to step out of line, whether to help a fellow creature or to save one’s own skin, and how modern systems of all sorts play on that.

That’s not to say that Weiss in any sense exonerates the Nazis--including the occasional functionary who would take pity on an inmate and truly help him. (We hear a few examples of that.) What he does say is that the death camps were a German example of human tendencies, and need to be studied, not mythologized.

To that end, a less obvious approach to the piece’s “good Germans” also would have been welcomed. Rather than playing them as conscious hypocrites, the actors would have interested us more if they had played them as people who actually do think of themselves as”good”--upright citizens who did their duty and refuse to admit any personal guilt in the results.

Making a ritual out of “The Investigation” (Michael Wood’s set and Addison Randall’s lighting and music contribute to that effect) belies the title. Weiss’ play should truly seem an investigation, not a show trial. Once more, though, the Megaw--which usually goes for much lighter stuff--is to be respected for tackling the play at all. One wonders why some of our downtown theaters haven’t been so bold.

‘THE INVESTIGATION’

Peter Weiss’ documentary drama, at the Megaw Theatre, Northridge. Director Michael Fuller. Set design Michael Wood. Lighting, sound design and original music Addison Randall. Costume coordinator Judith Shaw. Production stage manager P.J. Wiegers. Dramaturge Sasha von Scherler. With Helen Backlin, Edmund Balin, Jan Burrell, Carl Gabler, Herb Graham, Gladys Holland, John Lawrence, Pepper Martin, Simon Prescott, Alice Sachs, Helen Siff, Sasha von Scherler, Rota Zohar, Bill Zuckert. Plays Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m. Closes June 23. 17601 Saticoy St., Northridge. (818) 881-8166.