From Thursday, September 19 to Sunday, October 6, Theater for the New City (TNC) will present The Goldberg-Variations by George Tabori, directed by Manfred Bormann, regarded as America’s primary interpreter of Tabori’s work. Starring in the production are Jeff Burchfield, Jee Duman, Derrick Peterson, Alyssa Simon, Matt Walker and Dana Watkins.
This darkly comedic exploration of the Holocaust’s lingering impact blends absurdity with tragedy, delving into themes of guilt, memory and survival, questioning the nature of evil and the possibility of redemption. The play, which debuted in Vienna in 1991, is a backstage comedy set in Jerusalem. A play based on disasters in the Old and New Testaments is in rehearsal. The director of this play, Mr. Jay, is deliberately named with the initial of Jehovah. His assistant, Goldberg, is a Jew who is an Auschwitz survivor. Its plot points include the creation, the fall of man, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, the golden calf and the Crucifixion, all presented with a satirical combination of seriousness, farce and unashamedly bad jokes. Mr. Jay and Goldberg play out the relationship between God and man, father and son, victimizer and victim, antisemitic figure and Jew. Everything goes wrong in this rehearsal.
The play is named after Bach’s famous musical composition, “Goldberg Variations,” and like the music, it explores variations on a theme, delving into the different ways in which individuals cope with trauma and loss. Its dialogue is liberally laced with direct quotes and allusions to verses from Scripture and lines from Shakespeare, Milton, Celan and Beckett. Some scholars see the play as a reinterpretation of Tabori’s earlier work, The Cannibals, revisiting themes of the Holocaust, memory, and survival, but with a more complex and layered narrative structure.
Tabori was born in Budapest in 1914. As a young man, he traveled to Berlin to study the hotel business but was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1935 because of his Jewish background. He went to London where he worked for the BBC, obtained British citizenship and worked as a foreign correspondent in Sofia, Belgrade, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Cairo. His father was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother, Paul Tabori (a writer and psychical researcher), dodged the Nazis. In 1947, Tabori emigrated to the United States, where he became a translator (mainly of works by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch) and screenwriter of about ten films and adaptations, in addition to his body of work as a playwright.
The schedule is Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM, Sundays at 3:00 PM. $18 gen. adm., $15 seniors & students. Box office: www.theaterforthenewcity.net.
TNC is located at 155 First Ave., NYC
