Thursday, June 21, 2012

A play I cannot write, but maybe you can.

My second plot is for a play that I am not qualified to write. This is best served by a passionate Jewish playwright. If you're that playwright, please get in touch.
The Play: Homeroom.
Any Midwestern city. 1969. The setting, the homeroom of a local high school. A Jewish male student has been staying late to have a talk with his 40-year-old homeroom teacher, Miss. Stein. She finds it difficult to get the initially uncomfortable student to express his reason for wishing to talk to her. Finally he blurts it out: "I think you're Anne Frank." An astonishing statement that she does not dismiss out of hand, but challenges  him to defend this strange statement. Over the course of the play he says he believes that Anne was saved from Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated by the British on April 15, 1945. He posits that she was in a delirious, uncommunicative condition and sent to a sanitarium.  By the time she recovered her health several years later, she realized that she had become an important  symbol of courage and endurance that was very important to the Jews of the post-Holocaust.  Not wishing to diminish the importance of her diary first published in Dutch in 1947,  she assumed a new identity and came to America where she eventually became a teacher. For every challenging question Miss Stein asks, the student has a reply. How would I have seen my father who survived? Why has no one recognized me? The clever student has an answer for each question. Miss Stein never denies his theory, so the audience can draw any conclusion it chooses after an evening of spirited and emotional debate and disturbing facts about the Holocaust.

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