Fellow Travelers
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Local playwright Margaret Lewis doesn’t need developments like this to give her emotionally complex, morally confounding Fellow Travellers urgency, but the timeliness of this Stage Left world premiere does add a certain extra chill. The play, which is about Nazi censorship and its repercussions, focuses on German art students and best friends Karl and Max. Karl is a committed modernist who paints jarring compositions in unnatural colors, a darling of the German avant-garde, while Max is a neoclassical landscape painter dismissed as a brilliant technician out of touch with the times. Then Hitler’s aesthetic predilections become state policy. (“Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized,” he once said.) In one of the fuhrer’s many rapidly developed “new programs,” the art department chair–who encourages students to create new, idiosyncratic work–disappears. His replacement, who champions Aryan form and beauty, expels Karl and grooms Max for official success.
Lewis manages to transform the usual issues in plays about art–freedom of expression versus censorship, tradition versus innovation, truth versus political reality–into life-and-death human dilemmas. Her nuanced depiction of Max, whom she could have made into a tragic or villainous tool of the Nazi party, is one of the best things about Fellow Travellers. Though Max dislikes the ruling party, a brilliant career awaits, and he becomes a Nazi “as a formality” to get his paintings shown. Besides, aren’t artists supposed to keep up with the times? Though he sincerely believes in the soul-restoring properties of classical art, he hates the idea of his friend’s “ugly modernist” work being censored. In fact, once Karl is officially labeled a degenerate and an enemy of the state, Max secretly provides him with the materials he needs to work–an act of treason. In the play’s most provocative moment, Max claims Karl’s best painting as his own. But you’re not sure whether he’s stealing his friend’s thunder or trying to save the canvas from Nazi bonfires, risking being classified a degenerate himself.
When: Through 4/1: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Tony V. Martin.
