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The Mrs Stern of the title is the married name of Hannah Arendt, the political theorist much remembered for her “banality of evil” insight. Jenny Lyn Bader sets her play not, as you might expect, in the Prussian state library, but in a police cell where Arendt has been hauled in for questioning not long after the Reichstag fire.
The Nazi apparatus has extended its remit to political crimes and she, what with her bookish ways, errant husband and associations with Jewish intellectuals, has come under scrutiny.
The suspicion is that rather than pursuing esoteric concerns, such as her doctoral dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine, she has been illegally researching antisemitism and farming out evidence to Zionist associates elsewhere in Europe. She plays it airy and innocent – her eyes might have strayed on to the occasional newspaper article when she was searching for a recipe – while her interrogator, an officer newly transferred from prosecuting conventional crimes, tries ineffectually to find cracks in her defence.
At a time before the full horror of Hitler’s programme has come into place, it is still possible to expose contradictions in state policy: they come close to agreeing that Zionists and Nazis share common ground in the belief in a Jewish state, and only hasty backtracking gets them out of that one. In the meantime, the interrogator finds much to admire in Arendt’s worldview and, counter to Gestapo protocol, does his best to help her.
Given Arendt went on to flee Germany and make her name internationally, publishing The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the encounter marks a significant turning point that might easily have been the end of her. Sadly, the play has little feel for the dramatic. Rather, it is an old-fashioned back-and-forth between an evasive Arendt and an intrigued interrogator that fights shy of confrontation. It could transfer seamlessly to radio.
Worse, for a show that has already had a run in New York, Ari Laura Kreith’s production for Luna Stage is strangely stilted. Arms crossed and clutching a coffee cup, Ella Kaille is physically locked up as Hannah, while Brett Temple looks uncomfortably out of place as her toothless inquisitor. It makes for a hesitant, untheatrical performance.
