Nazi persecution of male homosexuals began almost immediately upon Hitler's coming to power in 1933. Accusing gays (but not lesbians) of threatening the German birth rate from within, the police and Gestapo targeted gay individuals, clubs and meeting places. Later in the 1930s, a Reich Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion was created, and prosecutions under the anti-gay statute Article 175 were sharply increased. Between 1933 and 1945, about 100,000 men were arrested for homosexual practices, and about 50,000 were convicted. Of these, somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 were deported to concentration camps, where they were identified by a pink triangle on their prison clothes, and where they were treated, by guards and other prisoners, as the lowest, most wretched group in detention. Nobody knows exactly how many of these gays were murdered or died of hunger or disease, but it was probably about 60 percent — 3,000 to 9,000. When the war ended, anti-gay feeling among the victors meant that crimes against gays were ignored in the Nuremberg trials and in the trials of Nazi doctors. As for Article 175, the key legal weapon against gays, it wasn't repealed in Germany until 1994.Martin Sherman's play Bent, which opened on Broadway in 1979, has the honor of being the work which redeemed — for Americans, at least — Nazi Germany's persecuted gays from public forgetfulness or, more likely, ignorance. The power of the work hasn't decreased in 25 years. Watching Bent in the forceful production at St. Petersburg's Suncoast Theatre, your sense of the Holocaust will be forever altered: henceforth you'll have to note that along with Jews and Gypsies, political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses, men whose only crime was loving other men were subjected to the barbarous cruelties of the Nazi sadists. And Bent makes another statement: it shows us precisely what can happen when anti-gay feeling is allowed to express itself without moderation by legal restraints. The gay-bashers in America aren't so marginal as to make this lesson inessential. And from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, contemporary events remind us what atrocities even Americans are still capable of. Bent is memory; but it's also cautionary.
The story it tells is about Max and Rudy, two longtime lovers in Berlin whose only major problem is finding rent money. Then Max brings a stranger, Wolfgang, home from a nightclub; when it turns out he's a suspect in a plot against Hitler, Max and Rudy find themselves guilty by association. They make a run for it, but are caught in Cologne; during the transit to Dachau, SS goons murder Rudy. Having been warned by a fellow gay prisoner named Horst that wearing the pink triangle can be fatal, Max manages to be identified not as a gay but as a Jew. He's sentenced to carry heavy rocks back and forth from one pile to another, endlessly and senselessly. He manages to get Horst assigned to the same detail and, under the worst of conditions, the two men achieve a kind of love that even includes verbal sex. But Horst falls ill, and the camp guards are all too ready to finish off a prisoner who gives in to bodily weakness. Max tries to help Horst, but in the savage world of the camp, Horst's sickness — and his status as a homosexual — make him a marked man … .
The power of the play is all in the situations: lovers at play, running for their lives, separated by murder; the survivor trying to endure the camp, finding an ally, struggling to remain human, striving to save his new lover. The actual dialogue in Bent is somewhere between crude and inelegant; there's hardly a single line in over two hours that bears repeating or remembering. Yet because these situations are so elemental, because our knowledge of the Nazi horror tells us in advance that such things must have happened, we respond to the play for its documentary character and can almost ignore its failings as a work of fiction. Even the most tedious moments of the play — those scenes in mid-Act Two wherein there's little going on but talk and the cycle of stone-lugging — make a claim on our attention because of our feeling, impossible to resist, that we're seeing something that really happened.
And the acting is good enough to help us ignore the failings in the dialogue. Best of all is Daniel Harris, whose Horst is so hauntingly convincing, one can't imagine a time when this tortured character wasn't just inches away from death. But excellent also is Lawrence W. Buzzeo, whose Max goes from charming ne'er-do-well in the early scenes to an exhausted, one-step-from-hopeless spirit by the last moments of Act Two. Michael Titone as Max's lover Rudy turns in a likable but not very rich performance, but Bill Bryant as female impersonator Greta and Slake Counts as Max's gay Uncle Freddie bring real personality to their roles, and the suggestion of a larger life offstage. Dave Thomas is fine in the small role of Wolf, and David Baker is disconcertingly convincing as the vicious Nazi captain who not only metes out life and death in wartime Germany, but leaves the theater to harass the audience during intermission. Trevor Keller's direction is solid throughout, and Buzzeo and Keller's set, of stone walls in disrepair, seems to imply that the evil we witness in the course of the play had a habitation on Earth long before the 20th century. Finally, I have to note David Hershman's fine sound design; the sinister rhythms of a train carrying victims to the slaughter could hardly have been more disturbingly reproduced.
And like those rhythms, this play is about something outside of speech, about deep love and profound hatred, about harsh cruelty and invincible kindness. Even with its limitations, Bent is a harrowing experience, and it's certainly the best play that Gypsy Productions has brought us in its inaugural season.
Gays or Jews, Vietnamese or Moslems: we have to be vigilant not to dehumanize anyone. Once we judge any person to be outside our shared humanity, all sorts of atrocities become possible. And logical.
That's the message of Bent.
And it's one that, if we can trust the evidence, we still need to hear.
mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or @ letters@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2004.