About Sin And Judgment: Theater at Bard

It is 1937, the year the Nazis built Buchenwald. The year Hitler laid plans to invade Czechoslovakia. The year German Jews were banned from playing Mozart and Beethoven in public.

   This is the year in which Ödön von Horváth set “Judgment Day,†his play about original sin, responsibility and guilt.

   And this is the play Caitríona McLaughlin, a small, round, animated woman from Donegal, the most northern and western county in Ireland, is directing for Bard’s summer program on composer Alban Berg and his world.

   Like Berg, von Horváth aimed to describe life in Germany before World War II. It was a bleak world with powerless courts, high unemployment and jackbooted nationalism. Women were fired to make jobs for men and were instructed to stay home and tend families. And the most unspeakable “solutions†were devised to keep Germany pure.

   In this world, Von Horváth’s characters, living in a small German town, wrestle with authority, social pressures. And judgment.

   Now practically everyone grapples with such matters in Western life. McLaughlin herself grew up in a provincial world in which theater was supposedly peopled by louche, even dangerous, misfits. Nonetheless, she was determined to be an actor. “I always loved not being myself,†she says. “I loved anything that gave me words.â€

   Of course reciting Yeats and Shakespeare in school gave McLaughlin words. And so did debating sessions. But her parents could not allow her a life on stage. So she studied theater in secret. And when she finally became a professional actor and moved to London, her parents dismissed this as a phase.

   Now in her 30s, she has acted many roles and directed everything from “The Importance of Being Earnest†to “Rent.†And she knows a thing or two about swimming against the current, something many people avoid.

   “They are afraid to make their lives uncomfortable,†she says, which is why anything from petty theft to government-sanctioned torture, slides by, sometimes, without note.

   But closing our eyes is no solution, McLaughlin insists. Neither is blindly minding authority. “We are all responsible for what we act on and what we ignore.†Which is what “Judgment Day†is all about.

  
   “Judgment Day†runs at Bard’s Fisher Center July 14 - 25. For tickets and information, call 845-758-7900, or go to www.fishercenter.bard.edu.