For those who survive, sometimes the war will never end. Memories replay the pain daily.
Duke Drama's production of Donald Margulies' "The Model Apartment" this past weekend presented Lola and Max, two Holocaust survivors who are moving from New York to Florida to retire. However, their peaceful plans are interrupted when their daughter and her lover follow them south, making it impossible for them to live in the present as their past creeps up to them.
This is not a traditional, tiring story of Jewish suffering. It's also not a light, innocent Neil Simon comedy. The director, Trinity senior Hanny Landau, termed it a "tragicomedy."
Landau chose the play for personal reasons; her father is one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, she said. The show is not about the war, but about how the survivors cope with their memories afterwards.
Lola (Trinity junior Joanna Kaplan) reminded me of my grandmother. From her A-line skirt and square heels to her mannerisms, Kaplan created the perfect image of a Jewish grandma. The way she gently crossed her ankles every time she sat down, the arthritic position in which she held her hands, the slowness with which she took each step, all added life to her character. Kaplan packed guilt and misery into just a look; she didn't have to say a word. It was perfect.
The show is set up in a series of scenes that each show a flash of a later moment in the couple's first evening in Florida. Some scenes allow us to see into the characters' thoughts when they are alone. Through these snapshots, we see Lola's own dreams--more than simply the external woman who offers food as love to her family. We see the loneliness she feels, a woman distant from a husband who won't share his past with her. She bolts out of a dream in which she remembers not looking back at her mother being dragged away by the Nazis and calling out to her.
Her husband Max's dreams are no more peaceful as he searches them for the daughter he lost during the war. Trinity senior David Weiner's portrayal of this man torn between his past and present was incredible. All of his dreams are spent looking for his daughter. The tragedy is that he will never find her. He is left with waking up to his living daughter, Debby, who forces herself into Max's life, emphasizing the differences between the lost daughter whose hug he longs for and the beast from whose embrace he forcibly disentagles himself.
Debby, played by Trinity junior Tina Renee Fulp, burst with energy from the moment she stomped onto the set. She kept up fast, wild monologues throughout her time on stage, from when she was scarfing down a bag of bagels to when she had sex on stage behind the fold-out couch on which her parents were sleeping.
Fulp created her character to be just as annoying to the audience as she must have been to Max. But despite her blunt humor and grotesque mannerisms, her pain showed through. Fulp revealed her unhappiness with her life because she can never live up to her fathers dream of a daughter.
Debby's life is obsessed with stories of the Holocaust. She relives it. She thinks that Howard Johnson's is a front for the Nazi party; she says that she was a lifeguard at a Nazi summer camp. She won't let her parents forget or run away from their painful past. She forces them to confront it. And to confront her.
When the cast joined hands to take the curtain call, it frankly was a surprise that left the audience hanging. The abrupt ending wasn't satisfying--it gave no closure to the show. However, it fit the lives of the couple. Nothing in their lives was ever fully resolved. Their past and their pain were constantly with them, never going away.
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