From Jan. 21- 31, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier hosted the North American premiere of Peter Weiss’s multiple Tony Award winning play, “The Investigation.” Any true theater aficionado would ask the question, “What do you mean by premiere, Weiss’s play came out over 40 years ago?” This production is different, however, mainly because it was performed by a mostly Rwandan theater troupe.
Conceived and directed by Dorcy Rugamba, this 80-minute production of “The Investigation” covers the same ground as the original five-hour version from 1964. It is an account of the 1964-65 Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt, West Germany, at which many of the famous concentration camp’s mid-level war crimes suspects stood trial for their atrocities. When, several years ago, Mr. Rugamba watched a Swedish company perform the play, he realized that there were profound parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and those atrocities committed in Rwanda in 1994. He had already co-directed a play on Rwanda’s own genocide, and in 2001 founded a performing arts workshop in Kigali, Rwanda called Urwintore. The workshop proved to be the perfect vehicle for putting on his adaptation of Weiss’s famous work, which premiered in Rwanda in 2005 and has recently toured Belgium, France, England and Japan.
Performed in French, with large English subtitles projected onto a backdrop screen, “The Investigation” walks us through the cycles of accusations, evidence and denials found at most war crimes trials. One after another, the doctors, officials and mid-level officers who served at Auschwitz are brought before the court. The evidence is presented against them, complete with eyewitness accounts of abysmal living conditions, inhumane medical experiments, frequent torture and the execution of many thousands of innocents. At one point, a witness testified that a young boy stole a rabbit from a laboratory to give to his three-year old sister. When he was caught in the act, one of the officers currently standing trial then took the boy, his sister and the rabbit out of sight and promptly shot them all dead. These accounts are endlessly replayed, each time a different story but always with the same tinge of abject horror or disgust.
The cavalcade of atrocities grinds on throughout the production, yet what makes Weiss’s play so provocative was the battery of excuses offered to the court by those accused. The most brutal of these men simply denied their acts of sadism or questioned the number of deaths attributed to their command. “We did what we were told,” was also a common answer. While it is true that these men would likely have been shot had they refused orders, a main focal point of Weiss’s writing was to expose this logic as merely an excuse to take shelter within. Basically, the Frankfurt trials were Germans trying Germans for crimes against humanity, so, in the end, their weak logic could not withstand the sheer weight of their crimes and the evidence presented against them.
Well-directed and beautifully acted, “The Investigation” was performed on a simple two-level stage with little more than a pair of waist-high railings for props. Six men and one woman played witnesses, lawyers and the accused, and they performed their roles with conviction and experience. At one point, they also sang a song about the Rwandan genocide in their native African language. Afterwards, a question and answer session was hosted by the director and cast, in which the true message of Mr. Rugamba’s production was shared with the audience. His message was that we as a global civilization have not yet healed from the wounds of the Nazi Holocaust. The reality of recent history shows us that had we actually learned from this lesson, the more recent atrocities in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur might never have taken place. As one member of the audience stated, genocide can happen at any time and anywhere, and it is up to artists like these to help raise and maintain awareness in the hopes that it will never happen again.