‘Denial’ of Holocaust Horrors : Peter Sagal’s Play Targets Revisionism

Tonight, four days after the 50th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death--memorialized around the world last week by public readings of her eloquent diaries--South Coast Repertory weighs in with its own Holocaust commentary: a NewSCRipts presentation of Peter Sagal’s “Denial.”

The Harvard-educated writer, 30, believes that the SCR Mainstage reading of his new play could not come at a better time or in a more appropriate place.

In an interview Saturday at SCR, Sagal pointed out that the Institute for Historical Review is just down the road in Newport Beach, where it serves as a clearinghouse for the notion that the Holocaust never occurred. One of its basic tenets, he added, is that Anne Frank’s diary is part of a hoax foisted upon the world by a Jewish conspiracy to defame the Nazis.

Among the five characters in his play, Sagal focuses on a revisionist “very loosely based” on a Northwestern University engineering professor who wrote a seemingly legitimate work of historical research in 1973 called “The Hoax of the 20th Century,” which has become the bible of the Holocaust-denial movement.

But that was just one of Sagal’s starting points. The key protagonist of “Denial,” he said, is a Jewish attorney. She is asked by the American Civil Liberties Union to represent an anti-Semitic propagandist who alleges that the government violated his free-speech rights when it confiscated his records to investigate him.

Sagal, who is Jewish, said that his play explores the conflict between morality and justice. As The Times put it in a 1991 editorial about the Institute for Historical Review and similar revisionists: “Does error enjoy the protection of the First Amendment? Does anti-Semitic fraud enjoy the same protection?”

What irks Sagal and is reflected in “Denial,” he said, is the innocuous cloak of academic respectability that some Holocaust revisionists wrap themselves in.

Indeed, when the Institute for Historical Review was based in Costa Mesa, its director contended in response to The Times editorial that the organization was “simply taking issue with a number of claims made about the Holocaust, such as allegations that the Nazis employed ‘gas chambers’ and planned or implemented an extermination program against the Jews of Europe.”

Sagal is not the first to consider that argument absurd, but he may be the first to dramatize the revisionist “call for open debate” on the issue in a professional resident theater and certainly in an Orange County venue.

(Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust play “Blue Light” had a sleazy, violent revisionist academic in it last summer at the Bay Street Theater Festival in Sag Harbor, N.Y. She is rewriting the play, under her original title, “The Shawl,” for a New York staging.)

Sagal began working on “Denial” last spring in Minneapolis, where he has spent 2 1/2 years on two consecutive Jerome Fellowships and other grants at The Playwrights Center. “I felt from the beginning--and after a fair amount of research on (Holocaust revisionists), I still do--that they’re not scholars,” he said. “They believe in what they’re saying in the same sense that some people believe Martians killed Kennedy.”

He said he realized that Holocaust revisionism is “a form of torture.” It is like beating someone to death with a bat designed to inflict psychological rather than physical pain.

“They write articles that people weren’t made into soap. They know it drives us crazy. They write articles saying ‘Let’s talk about both sides.’ They have chosen our history to hit us where we live.”

For European and American Jews, “the Holocaust has become a profoundly important part of our identity,” the balding, square-jawed playwright continued. “Even for someone like me, who grew up Jewish in New Jersey with no experience of the camps directly or indirectly through my immediate family, their attack is a tremendous blow. Why is it that I’m so vulnerable? And that leads to other questions, like ‘What right do I have to speak of the Holocaust?’ ”

Trying to answer these questions, Sagal discovered “the emotional center” of his play, which was “the temptation to violence.” He read revisionist literature at the University of Minneapolis library and became enraged. “I wanted to pick up the nearest club,” he recounted.

But the play didn’t coalesce until Sagal recognized that “the real challenge is how to avoid the attempt to drag us down to their level of hatred.”

Sagal said he found a specific dramatic device for “Denial” when he came across a report of a black ACLU lawyer who defended a member of the Ku Klux Klan and won the case.

“The lawyer was kicked out of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People for doing that,” Sagal recalled. “But he said, ‘Look, this is what I do. The law is the law, and the whole point of the law is that no matter who you are, you deserve a defense.’ So I thought it would be interesting to make my lawyer a Jew and see what happens.”

Sagal has written five previous full-length plays, four produced: “Kim’s Sister” (about art and life in Los Angeles), workshopped last summer at the Sundance Festival in Utah; “What To Say” (about a prostitute and a professor), staged in 1993 at Seattle Repertory; “The Toy Truck” (adapted from a Sanskrit play called “The Clay Cart”), mounted by the Cornerstone Theater Co. in 1992 at Angelus Plaza, a housing project for the elderly in Los Angeles, and “Semi-Sterile” (a fictionalized autobiography), workshopped in 1991 at the Audrey Skerball-Kenis Theater in Los Angeles and mounted at Upstart Stage in Berkeley.

Sagal’s first outing was at Harvard’s Hasty Pudding during his junior year. He co-wrote “Between the Shieks,” a road-comedy satire on multinational capitalism, for the theater club’s annual show. The piece was set in So Long, Abyssinia, a town in the Middle East where a Holy Crusader by the name of Count Yerblessings arrives to save the townspeople from the slippery black goop that keeps bubbling out of the ground.

“When I was in college, I always fancied myself a playwright,” Sagal said. “I even called myself a playwright sometimes. But I really didn’t write anything. I was terrified that if I did, it might not be brilliant. I wasn’t much of a scholar, either, because I kept hanging around the theater.”

When Sagal graduated in 1987, he headed straight to Los Angeles. “I had been pretty much raised ‘to go to Harvard,’ ” he explained. “That was my job in life. And now that it was done, I had no idea what to do next. So I decided that obviously the thing to do was go to Hollywood and be a Hollywood writer, which is what everybody else seemed to be doing.”

Sagal landed an entry-level job at a production company reading screenplays for $30 each. He got bored with that rather quickly, going broke in the bargain. Spotting a Los Angeles Theatre Center want ad, he went for an interview. “I was hoping to do some stage managing just to keep my hand in the theater.” But when he showed up, Sagal was hired as a literary associate.

Nine months later, his boss left. Sagal was promoted to literary manager and, not long after, dramaturge. “My role was to help people make their plays better, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it.”

Sagal says he eventually got to be a good, if not spectacular, literary manager and brought a handful of new works to the theater during his two years there, among them Christopher Durang’s “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” Jo Carson’s “Daytrips,” Anna Deveare Smith’s “Piano” and Eduardo Machado’s “A Burning Beach.”

But as a dramaturge he felt he lacked a crucial ingredient for the job. “You have to be selfless, maybe even pathologically selfless,” he explained. “You’re always helping other people do their work without getting any credit.”

Worse, great dramaturges generally don’t want to write plays, he believes. This did not bode well for him, because every time he met playwrights he admired--Neal Bell, Marlene Myers, Donald Margolies, Tony Kushner, Jose Rivera--he didn’t want to help them so much as be them.

Meanwhile, Sagal could hardly keep track of LATC’s staff turnover. “The low pay, the enormous amount of work and the chaotic management style drove people out. It got to the point where you didn’t go out of your way to meet the newcomers, because you knew they wouldn’t last. It was like being in an infantry regiment at the Somme.”

In 1990, 2 1/2 years after being hired and a year before LATC’s fiscal collapse, Sagal quit. Then he went home and began to write. He also directed a play at the Melrose Theatre, became involved with the Antaeus Company, the Mark Taper Forum and the Actor’s Gang, collaborated with the Wilton Project, filmed a commercial for the Pasadena Playhouse and did some free-lance journalism.

Within two years he ran up $5,000 in unpaid bills on his credit card just for living expenses. But he kept writing plays and finally felt he had to get out of Los Angeles.

“Although it’s a great place to be a playwright, it’s a terrible place to become one. I figured out that I had to finish becoming one someplace else.”

The Jerome Fellowship took him to Minneapolis in 1992, where he has been gaining traction ever since. “I’m ‘an emerging playwright,’ as they say. I’ve been slowly but steadily emerging.”

If SCR wants to discover him, he adds, “I’m ready.” He might even move back to Los Angeles.

“Denial” will receive a staged reading tonight at 7:30 on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. With Alan Mandell, Jon Matthews, Susan Patterson and Al Ruscio. $7. (714) 957-4033.