In an interview with The Washington Post in 1974,
Elie Wiesel noted that “we live in an age of theater,
in which the most important messages are being said, not
in books, but on the stage.” Two years later he repeated
and emphasized this idea to a New York Times reporter: “Since
the end of WWII, the most important and meaningful words
have been said on the stage: Brecht and Beckett, Sartre
and Camus, Hochhuth and Ionesco influenced this generation
as much as novels had influenced the previous one, and perhaps
more.” This one-act play is the first and only unknown
dramatic work of Elie Wiesel. Although the other texts in
the volume in which the play originally appeared were translated
into English, the publisher did not know “how to make
it fit” and so it was not included. Written in French
in 1968, this play is the only one set during the Shoah
period, in 1942. Each word sears the flesh. The audience
is left with a scar from an ancient time, a time that could
not have existed, a time of a nightmarish fairy-tale.
Once
Upon A Time takes place under “a black canopy,”
“a black sky” where Jews had to fight against
mankind, refusing to play the scapegoat to be sacrificed
in this Holocaust. The stage then transforms into an incredible
battlefield where the sounds of tears mix with the thud
of Nazi boots to become a haunting prayer:
I no
longer ask you for either happiness or paradise; all I
ask of You is to listen and let me be aware of Your listening.
I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive
them and
make them part of You.
I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom; I only
ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most
trivial kind, or of surprise and friendship.
Love? Love is not Yours to give.
As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or
even to enlighten
them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your
powers. If You
must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers.
But not Your
countenance.
They are modest, my requests, and humble. I ask You what
I might ask a
stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.
I ask you, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to enable
me to pronounce
these words without betraying the child that transmitted
them to me: God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, enable me to forgive You
and enable the
child I once was to forgive me, too.
I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even
for his faith. I only beg You to listen to him and act
in such a way that You and I can listen to him together."
(by
Elie Wiesel, from “prayer” in his collection
One Generation After)
Presenting
this play during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah has a double
meaning: remembering the atrocity of the Shoah and
the triumph of human spirit enlightened by the flame of
hope…
Guila Clara Kessous, Director
November 2007 |
