culture

One of the year's great shows
by Eric Jackson

To tell you the truth, I don't see most of the plays in this country, nor do I attend all that many of the concerts. That limits my ability to credibly pass out superlatives in any absolute sense. But still, I see a lot and I know what I like, and Bent was the best play I have seen on the Panamanian stage in a long time. I can't imagine that it won't win awards when the theater people get together and decide who and what was best on Panama's 2008 theater scene.

The show starts with a wild scene in a gay nightclub in mid-30s Germany and Max (Rogelio Bustamante) recovering the next morning in the apartment he shares with Rudy (Joshua Manopla C.) and discovering that he brought this young military stud Wolf (Juan Francisco Diez) home from the previous night's revelry.

What started as a difficult domestic scene turns into a nightmare when the SS burst in. Wolf is a high-ranking member of the Nazi brownshirts (SA) and this is the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler suppressed the SA and murdered its homosexual commander, Ernst Röhm, supplanting the SA with the more obedient SS and beginning a wave of mass persecutions against Germany's previously somewhat tolerated gay community. The men in black came to kill Wolf and they do so. Greta (Carlos Caballero in one of his two roles), a female impersonator from the club, warns that Max and Rudy must get out immediately, that it's no longer safe to be gay in Germany. Greta goes back to his wife, kids and the straight life and Max and Rudy end up homeless and hiding in the woods.

But not for long. The SS get them and one of their officers (Juan Carlos Avedaño) not only browbeats Max into denying that Rudy is his friend, but forces him to participate in Rudy's torture. Rudy doesn't survive, but Max does, being sent to Dachau not as a homosexual but as a Jew.

There he meets, befriends and argues with Caballero's other character, the very much out Horst, under the constant torments of Avedaño's SS character.

So who is the best supporting actor here? Manopla was good as the homebody ballet dancer Rudy, who talked to his plants and made breakfast and coffee and just couldn't understand why he should flee from his home. In his role as Horst, Caballero was an upright, principled, courageous and ultimately martyred character, very much different than his other role as Greta, and he was very good. But Avedaño was the truly chilling representation of Nazi cruelty in his brilliant performance of the anti-hero role.

To play the lead role in such a strong cast called for some inspired acting, which was forthcoming from Bustamante, who redeems himself from the degradation of denial, if not from the oppressions of Dachau, in the end.

But if one is to praise the acting of those mentioned above, one must also in fairness mention the excellent direction of Edwin Cedeño and the Martin Sherman play's worthy translation and adaptation from its original English by Teresita Mans and Tomás Guardia.

Who does and who does not support such a play is telling. Panama's gay and lesbian communities turned out in force to see Bent. So did a lot of straight theater lovers. The Teatro La Quadra has bonded with much of the El Cangrejo bar and restaurant scene, the latter of which provided financial support to the production. The corporate sponsors included the Sheraton, Durham College, Budget rent-a-car and several other enterprises. Also pitching in were the embassies of Canada and Germany. But where the hell was the Panamanian government's INAC? Oh, that's right --- the PRD was during the course of this show imitating George W. Bush and trying to score political points by bashing the queers, this time by prohibiting the adoption of children by lesbians and gay men. No INAC logo on this theatrical work. And the Americans? Actually, a bunch of gringos and gringas did see the play, but not only is the US government overtly anti-gay, it's also into torture these days and this was a very anti-torture play. Thus, although this is an adaptation of an American play whose Broadway production starred Richard Gere the US Embassy was not among the sponsors. So now we have a better idea of who stands where.

The conservative governments of Germany and Canada drew the distinction between conservatism and fascism at a time when the American right seems determined to blur that line. In the playbill and out in the hall there were historical materials about many of the groups whom the Nazis persecuted --- the Jews, the communists, the socialists, the Gypsies, the Jehovah's Witnesses as well as the homosexuals. When the allied armies liberated the Nazi concentration camps, they tended to keep the homosexuals locked up with the common criminals and it was many decades before the German government even acknowledged the Nazi-era persecution of homosexuals, let alone offered compensation to those concentration camp survivors who wore the pink triangle.

The Germans seem to have learned their lesson about hate-driven politics, but meanwhile in America the neo-cons are the last bastion of Jewish Holocaust deniers --- Jews who deny that any other group was persecuted by the Nazis, who flaunt their bigotry toward gay people, and who conclude from the concentration camp lessons that the right-wing governments they support shouldn't hesitate to torture people. This has always been a minority streak within Jewish opinion and now neoconservatism stands widely discredited in the world and it's certainly not the banner that any wise candidate would want to carry in this year's US elections. But leave it to the Canadians and Germans to subtly promote conservatism without the bigotry, torture and "preventive" wars.

Thus Bent, and the public reception it had, became more than just a risqué play. It was also a barometer reading of tolerance versus intolerance around us.

But mainly, it was one very good play.