RESORT 76 Infamous Commonwealth Theatre
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Shimon Wincelberg’s 1962 play Resort 76 (originally titled The Windows of Heaven), now receiving a midwest premiere by the Infamous Commonwealth Theatre, addresses the Holocaust’s horrors through a darkly humorous, fablelike story about a cat. It’s not on a par with Underground or Ghetto, by Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol, but if you’ve never read “A Cat in the Ghetto,” the 1959 short story by Holocaust survivor Rachmil Bryks on which Wincelberg’s work is based, you might find a lot to admire here. You might also, however, be disturbed by Wincelberg’s distortion of Bryks’s work and dismayed by director Danielle Mari’s production of the play.
In the story, the cat is found by Mrs. Hershkovitch, a “broken shard of a woman” who asks 24-year-old factory watchman Shloime Zabludovitch to turn in the animal and split the reward with her so she can feed her starving children. Over the next 50 pages, as Zabludovitch figures out how to accomplish his task, Bryks takes his readers on a sobering tour of the ghetto, where people boil sickly radish leaves into “meat,” German guards shoot Jews out for an evening walk, and workers in Zabludovitch’s “resort,” as they call the factory, sanitize the bloody clothes of Jews murdered in the concentration camps to make carpets for Nazi officials.
In the last of the three acts, following the example set by the unassuming James Dunn as Blaustain, the cast begins to dig a bit deeper into their characters–there’s more gravitas, less exaggeration. But it’s too little, too late. The stagey indulgence that preceded the shift leaves a dreadful aftertaste.
