Watching “Memoriam,” now having its world premiere at Houston’s Main Street Theater, I kept having Marshall McLuhan’s old philosophical chestnut pop into my head: “The medium is the message.” For this is a play about messages. Or more specially about an event generating frequent discussion: the Nazi extermination of 6 million people during the time known as the Holocaust.
Films often coat the Holocaust in sentiment while books can spread over it a layer of dry numbers and black and white photographs that distance readers from it. A Holocaust museum frequently unsettles, generating anguish as it immerses visitors in the artifacts of human suffering. But what of drama?
“Memoriam” takes drama back to its roots in argument and debate—the thing Greek playwrights thought of as “agons.” But the play’s debate is not the one audiences might expect — the back and forth about the reality of the Holocaust familiar from social media. “Memoriam”’s debate is about how memories of the Holocaust can or should be preserved.
Set in the near future, a company called Memoriam has developed a way to extract memories from human minds, digitize those memories, and market them to anyone who wants to experience those memories through devices similar to a virtual reality visor. Rachel (Julia Krohn) is an upper management employee of Memoriam who is tasked with convincing Rivka (Chesley Ann Santoro), her grandmother and a Holocaust survivor, to make her memories eternal and available to anyone with the money to pay for them. Rivka isn’t sure whether she wants the horrors in her memories—the deaths of her parents and twin sisters, the atrocities of the concentration camps—to survive at all, wishing in part they would disappear from her brain.
And so the debate begins. David (Dain Geist), another of Rivka’s grandchildren and Rachel’s brother, is adamantly opposed; he doesn’t want his grandmother’s life invaded, her memories dragged out and delivered to strangers. Chris (Dillon Dewitt), Rachel’s boss doesn’t want what he sees as a potentially sure revenue source to vanish. Rachel doesn’t want to endanger a job she loves by failing and sees the process as balancing the presence of Nazi memories already in Memoriam’s system.
Playwright Noga Flaishon does a fine job of continually stoking and elaborating the issues on all sides, eventually making Rivka the last survivor still alive and able to pass on memories. In spots, she slows the debate with less important side plots, but her script is otherwise lean, clear, and powerfully disturbing. What will be the medium by which future generations will know one of the darkest moments in the 20th century, if not the entire history of humanity?
Director Julia Oppenheim makes sure the debate never turns static: just actors yelling at each other. She uses every inch of Main Street’s arena stage set up, where the actors circle a desk/table near the center reminding the audience that communion is at the play’s heart. The actors are superb, though Chesley Ann Santoro’s “Rivka” ultimately stands out, not by virtue of dominating the script, but due to her ability to communicate frail humanity, finding in herself a quiet, steely power. She embodies how weakness and strength combined are a virtue, rather than a flaw.
As a result of this fine production audiences may be surprised to find themselves thinking more than feeling—though they are sure to do both. But, ultimately, “Memoriam” is a journey not into the Holocaust but into humanity’s collective mind.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University. “Memoriam” is on stage at Houston’s Main Street Theater through April 19.
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