Word: keseberg
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...used a little-known incident as the fulcrum of the drama. A survivor, Lewis Keseberg (Jon De Vries), instituted a slander trial against other members of the group, led by James Reed (Berkeley Harris), who had accused him of theft and murder. Though Keseberg won his suit, the trial records do not exist, so the play is an imaginative reconstruction...
...physical level, the trial is concerned with who ate whom when. Even in cannibalism a pecking order is revealed. No particular stigma seems to be attached to having eaten two loyal Indian guides. Keseberg, being a German, is supposed to have acted out of depravity, while the native Americans plead pure necessity. When Keseberg reveals that he ate his own dead daughter, the horror of the primal taboo seems to invade the playhouse. It is as if one were present at the banquet at which Atreus served up to his brother Thyestes the three sons of Thyestes, and the father...
Devour the Snow is a profoundly moral play in the guise of a murder thriller. Polsky probes areas of guilt, self-deception, self-corruption and the agonizing question of "What price survival?" The cast is exemplary, and Jon De Vries as the tormented Keseberg sculptures a portrait of hell in ice. Toward the end, Polsky resorts to melodramatic devices that break the play's stark tension, but he is a welcome addition to the select company of playwriting naturals...
...Bestiality. Possibly the most horrible episode was discovered by the Fourth Relief. Lewis Keseberg, a German, had been left by his own request in the camp with Tamsen Donner and her dying husband. The Fourth Relief found a kettle full of pieces of George Donner, but there were legs of oxen which were lying around uneaten. Keseberg avoided the rescuers. He had long been suspected of stealing from the other members of the party. At last the rescuers cornered him "lying down amidst the human bones, and beside him a large pan full of fresh liver and lights...
They could not find Tamsen Donner. Keseberg later denied that he had killed her. But there in the camp he told the rescuers that "he ate her body and found her flesh the best he had ever tasted." They took Keseberg, "now a mere sac of bestiality," over the great divide down into California which had become America while he was developing his taste...
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