Open Wounds

Reviewed by: Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz Timothy B. Malchow OPEN WOUNDS: HOLOCAUST THEATER AND THE LEGACY OF GEORGE TABORI. Edited by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; pp. 208. George Tabori (1914–2007) is best known for his career as a playwright and director in the Germanspeaking theatre, from 1969 to the end of his life. From a family of Jewish origin in Budapest, his mother a convert to Catholicism and his father an atheist, Tabori became a BBC journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East during World War II, a novelist in postwar London, a screenwriter in California, and a playwright and director in New York. Although successful in these ventures, his breakthrough came when German speakers, hungry to interrogate the ongoing implications of the prior generation's responsibility for genocide, encountered his unconventional Holocaust theatre. Tabori's plays broke taboos in Germany by presenting Jews as protagonists, unsettling boundaries between victims and perpetrators and employing humor and the grotesque to shock and evoke visceral responses. Grounded in an inclusive, cosmopolitan humanism, they aimed at a transformative, even therapeutic, shared experience for the audience, the actors, society at large, and not least Tabori himself. His own father murdered in Auschwitz, Nazism had taught Tabori to see himself as a Jew and an outsider. Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori originated in a 2015 conference at the University of Georgia. Its editors, Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz, bring together an international group of scholars and theatre practitioners to explore Tabori's influence from multiple angles. Each essay is compelling in its own way. Introducing the volume, Kagel rightly suggests that Tabori's theatre work and its legacy merit more attention in the United States, not least because of how his experiences here influenced his methods and aesthetics. Assessing Tabori's impact is a complex undertaking, so the diversity of approaches in Open Wounds is highly appropriate. Under a hodgepodge of influences, including Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, Lee Strasberg, and Gestalt therapy, he developed no systematic methodology, focusing instead on experiments intended to transform performers and spectators alike and to blur the line between them. Following Kagel's insightful introduction, ten essays are grouped into four sections, the first of which, "Tabori Redux," consists of a single essay by the preeminent Tabori scholar Anat Feinberg. After a helpful overview of Tabori's life and work, she explores his most experimental and innovative [End Page 532] work as a director, explaining that he became better known as a playwright due to the timing of his Holocaust plays and the needs of superficially philo-Semitic German devotees who pigeonholed him as a "reconciliatory Jew" (30). The subsequent section on "Performance" opens with an essay by playwright, writer, director, and translator Laura Forti, recounting the challenges she faced directing The Cannibals (1968) in her native Italy. There, actors reportedly resisted embracing Tabori's emphasis on performance as transformation and identifying with Jewish characters and perpetrators. Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer, in her essay that follows Forti's, examines how Tabori's work appropriates the power of religious rituals while nonetheless establishing ironic distance. Klaus van den Berg closes out this section by drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of illumination to theorize Tabori's unique contribution to performance. The third section focuses on "Ethics and Aesthetics," opening with an essay by Rebecca Rovit, who employs trauma studies to investigate ethical implications of theatrical Holocaust representations that cast spectators as witnesses. She compares Tabori's work, especially Weisman and Copperface (1990), to plays by Charlotte Delbo, Joshua Sobol, and Peter Barnes. Freddie Rokem then considers Tabori's 2006 production of Brecht's Antigone adaptation alongside Brecht's original 1948 production. He also examines René Pollesch's references to the Brecht production in his 2016 staging of a different play. Rokem's essay explores the implications and limitations of theatre that self-reflexively highlights a produced work's performance history. The section ends with an essay by Jack Davis. He focuses on Pollesch's Cappuccetto Rosso (2005), meaningfully relating

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