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April 2, 2010
Forgiveness and justice
Characters in Refuge of Lies explore heavy themes.
JEANIE KEOGH
To what extent can a person who has committed horrible wrongdoings change? This is the crux of the issue in Ron Reed’s play Refuge of Lies, which centres on the redemption of a former Nazi war criminal 50 years after leaving his native Holland to live in Vancouver, as a reformed Christian.
First performed in Kitchener, Ont., by Theatre and Company and then at an off-Broadway venue in New York last year, Refuge of Lies opens at the Pacific Theatre next week.
Based on the true story of Jacob Luitjens, a former Nazi who was discovered to be living in Canada, who was pursued by a Dutch journalist, Reed said he wanted to explore the dissonance between forgiveness and justice.
Reed read about the Luitjens story in the newspaper in 1992, when the play is set, and was “horror struck” that a church would stand behind a man who had been a Nazi collaborator.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, don’t tell me that some rightwing church has been duped by this Holocaust-denying thing,’” Reed said.
It was only after he investigated and found out that the particular church was Mennonite, a religious sect that is active in international justice and peacekeeping missions in armed conflict regions that the story of Luitjens’ atonement started to seem more plausible.
Reed interviewed members of the church and uncovered a wide range of perspectives about the situation. He began asking questions: “What do we do when we’re guilty of something? How do we hide from our responsibilities? How guilty are we? How do we remember something we did 50 years ago? And, how can we make amends?”
Reed was forced to admit to himself that he no longer knew what to think, a reality, he said, that was “a good place to start a play.... It’s important to really give expression to all these different points of view, not to tie it up and solve it for people but to really explore the complexity of it.”
Reed examines the point at which the quest for justice becomes obsessive and where penitence becomes a desire to hide from culpability. He aims to provoke with Refuge, challenging biases so that the audience leaves the theatre with questions.
Actor Howard Siegel, who plays journalist Simon Katzman, was similarly provoked. His interest lay in the fact that the play dealt with the nature of guilt in a way he had never encountered. “It’s not just about placing blame so it’s different. It excites me because I have to reexamine things,” Siegel told the Independent.
Siegel had sworn off doing another Holocaust play. “I’ve done three Holocaust plays and I thought I was done with the issue and, unless there was a sort of a different take on it, I wouldn’t be interested in exploring that part of my life and history again,” he said, adding that the subject is painful for him to explore given the loss of his European family.
What hooked Siegel on the play was that he didn’t know how he was going to feel about the story as he went into rehearsal. “In the other pieces ... I’ve always known how I felt about the issue and it was a matter of having to explore those feelings. Now, there will be a new journey, a different kind of discovery as an actor, as a human being, as a Jew,” he said. “It makes me look at the issue from a different point of view, not just the point of view of cousins, uncles and aunts who didn’t make it out of Europe.”
Siegel said he also had to consider the possibility that what his character achieves is vengeance rather than justice. “I tell a story at the beginning of the play about a girl witnessing Russian soldiers raping German women and, instead of feeling horror or shame or sympathy, what they feel is joy, because they see it as recompense.”
That the innate need for justice that lives inside Siegal’s character hasn’t dulled with the passage of time is an example of how justice can be a motivation in its own right, as his character struggles with the question of whether to let the former Nazi go or to give him up.
Refuge of Lies plays April 9 to May 1 at Pacific Theatre (1440 West 12th Ave., at Hemlock). Visit pacifictheatre.org for tickets and more information.
Jeanie Keogh is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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