Word: playfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This play bathes in ambiguity--and almost drowns in it. One does not know why the families are suffering, why the French family is forced to leave its hometown and abandon their child. Who are these families? Are they Jewish? Are they resistance fighters? The director leaves important concrete details out of the picture on purpose--to assert the universality of the harm that World War II caused? Everybody already knows the war is bad, so what does this play do that's new? Part of the reason for the ambiguity, at least in the first part, is that...
...Although this play puts a rather original twist on the experience of the war, it lacks much in its execution. The blocking is overdone-- there is a constant cycle of walking back and forth and sitting down and getting up that detracts from the action of the play. There are several scenes in which nothing really happens except that the characters circle around the stage and come back to where they started. Lengthy pauses are another shortcoming. There is one point in which some Nazi guards stand in front of a bench for about five minutes without a single word...
...Despite the fact that this hour-long play could easily be condensed into 15 minutes, it does have some redeeming qualities. The props and especially the costumes are delightful. One real window hangs in the middle of the stage. This window is used by both families, and links them in a way. Both families have only a glass window to protect them from the forces of the war; both mothers wave goodbye to their sons from this window. It stands as a symbol of the common human suffering behind...
...play does pick up in the end, in the sense that it goes from basically no plot to more plot. Some interesting issues of child-parent relations are raised when the German family's child turns his own parents in to the Nazis. This action raises a lot of questions about the son's motivations for revealing that his parents are in league against the Nazis...
...This play should be applauded as a spirited attempt to make a new point about the war and its effect on certain families, but it is not as piercing as Life is Beautiful; the director-writer's vision falls apart at the seams because of the slow pace, unnecessary pauses, unrealistic acting and especially because the ambiguity is in danger of simply confusing the viewer instead of emphasizing the universality of the sadness and suffering that the war caused...