Review

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Evil and the banality of sex

By Larry Knowles

June 26, 2006

San Diego--Let’s not overthink this. “Hannah & Martin,” a play by Laterthanever Productions about the love affair between Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and his Jewish student Hannah Arendt, covers some deep existential themes involving perfidy, complicity and anxiety—that’s just what you get when you have Nazis, Jews, and philosophers up on the same stage for two hours.

However, the deep stuff mostly serves as intriguing texture to the otherwise conventional love affair between Hannah and Martin. What you’ll likely take away from the play, written by Kate Fodor and directed by Francine Chemnick, is that men will do anything to get laid. They’ll use their power, status, money, looks—anything they have in their quiver—to get a woman naked.

Stan Madruga and Christina Barsi as Martin and Hannah

Fodor’s Heidegger is an incorrigible pussy hound. Despite being a husband and father of two, he pursues the impressionable Hannah through a combination of professorial bullying and intellectual preening. In Hannah he has a captive—and captivated—audience. What you’ll also soon realize is that Nazis have the worst pickup lines in fascism.

When the moment comes for Heidegger to make his move on Hannah what does he do, whisper Kant and Kierkegaard in her ear? Offer the finest wine and cheeses? No, he gets down on his knees and begs to kiss…her dress.

Not her, or her undergarments…the hem of her dress.

“May I kiss your dress, Hannah?...May I kiss it?” he grovels from his knees, head tilted upward.

Are you kidding me! I can’t imagine a Franco or Mussonlini crony pulling that.

The man is similarly oafish after breaking up with Hannah. In an amusing scene where Hannah admits to being lonely after the breakup and wonders whether she should get out and socialize more, Fodor’s Heidegger urges her to…write him letters.

“Write me long letters, Hannah,” he exhorts.

Stan Madruga turns in a high-octane performance as Heidegger, bringing all the bombast and pretense that the role demands. He seems to relish the emotional range of Fodor’s Heidegger as though the part were a Porsche—and meant to be used. He doesn’t just take the role out for a test drive, he shakes out every gear. His transition from jocularity to self pity to rage as Martin goes from 0-60 in about 4.2 seconds, and is a heck of a lot of fun to watch.

Christina Barsi, a UCSD grad, is fantastic as Hannah, immersing herself in the role so thoroughly and bravely that midway through the first act you believe that the woman standing in front of you really is a precocious German philosophy student, that she really has been seduced by Madruga’s Heidegger. The early trepidation with which she regards the wolfish professor Heidegger, for example, appears uncannily genuine.

Madruga and Barsi work exceptionally well together as lovers and intellectual sparring partners, adjusting the tenor of their characters’ personalities with each shift in power. When Heidegger goes through humiliating deNazification after the war, for example, Hannah is there to both step on his throat and let him up.

Behind every cad is a long-suffering woman and in Heidegger’s case it’s his wife Elfride. Connie di Grazia plays Elfride with equal parts guile and resignation. Elfride, while enduring her husband’s indiscretions, is largely responsible for pushing Heidegger into Naziism, and di Grazia does a fine job of displaying Aryan haughtiness.

Women aren’t the only people in the play Heidegger screws. He turns his back on colleague and contemporary philosopher Karl Jaspers, who’s persecuted by the Nazis for having a Jewish wife. Mark Petrich plays the avuncular Jaspers, effectively delivering his character as the play’s moral cornerstone and muted voice of reason.

One of the sub-plots in Hannah & Martin is the Nuremburg trial of Hitler Youth organizer Baldur von Schirach, which Arendt covers for The New Yorker. Tony Malanga turns in a haunting performance as the hapless von Schirach. In the trial scenes, Malanga stands alone on the back of the stage, lost, staring vacuously into the middle distance. With his semitic looks and guileless persona, Malanga’s von Schirach is hardly the image of Teutonic vigor—and certainly not the personification of evil. The way Malanga nervously plays with his knuckles while awaiting the verdict is a poignant reminder of his character’s human side.

The entire play takes place amid a single set, designed by David Weiner, consisting of two pillars atop a tiered rectangular stage. With its many right angles, the set serves as a subtle, ever-present reminder of the rigidity of fascism.

It was Arendt who coined the term “the banality of evil,” in reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi transportation minister responsible for the mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps. As Arendt covered the Eichmann trial at Nuremburg (Fodor took creative license in H & M and substituted von Schirach), she concluded that Eichmann wasn’t an insidious sociopath, but rather an ambitious bureaucrat.

With the behavior of Heidegger throughout the play, though, perhaps an adjunct term could be “the banality of sex.” While you could think about the deeper stuff in Hannah & Martin, the fun comes in realizing that philosophers and intellectuals have fragile egos and lousy sex.

No need to overthink things.

Hannah & Martin plays through July 2 at the Lyceum Space in Horton Plaza. 619-544-1000. www.laterthanever.com.

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