www.clydefitchreport.com: In 2014, Barry Levey’s solo play about Holocaust denialism, Hoaxacaust!, ran in the New York International Fringe Festival, where it won an Overall Excellence Award. Previously, it was under development through such companies as The New Group, The Cell and Prospect Theater Company. Hoaxacaust!, as directed by Jeremy Gold Kronenberg, seemed so right for the moment, with its provocative title and topic as those Tea Party Republicans and anti-Semitic idiot-fringe Americans running around. But how innocent, how halcyon, how quaint it all seems. 2014. I mean, those people could never enter the political mainstream, right?
3 comments:
Based on the title of this article, I honestly had no idea what to expect, but honestly, I didn't really expect it to be about a play about Holocaust deniers. I had never heard of this play before today, and after reading this article, I want to keep looking into this play because it seems so interesting and not like any other show I have ever seen or read. The part I found most interesting about this article is how the way the show is being sold is so different from 2014 to now. In 2014 the show was sold as more satire and reading the blurb about it already gives me an impression that this show will be funny and about people who aren't real. Whereas reading the blurb from today really makes the show seem so real and makes the point that this show is really trying to make a political statement. Reading the blurb from today actually makes me scared for the future of this country if people in office or running for office are saying that because all of a sudden this is very real people and one now goes into the play knowing that this isn't just satire this is very much the world we are living in.
This article is so interesting, but I wish it had more information on how the play is written so I could give a more honest opinion on it. To me, it is a bad idea to give Holocaust deniers a platform, but I think it is very important to know what they are saying and why they are saying it. It is for this reason that I think this play could actually be a really awesome work which can inform us on what we need to watch out for in a society with a growing number of extremist viewpoints without promoting their ideas. The condition being that the lines were gathered from real conversations, but delivered by actors, not actual deniers. I do not think it would be wise to allow deniers to come in and state their views as it would be construed as a promotion of those ideals. We have seen this in the past few years with journalists wanting to bring Sandy Hook deniers onto cable television so we can better understand what we are dealing with, but to the detriment of the victims and their families and a detriment to the truth. We must not give these people a higher platform than is required to understand their ideas so we can get to the root of the issue and solve it. For Holocaust deniers, the author quickly found that they latched onto simply false "science-based" evidence that could be refuted if we only knew it needed to be. Sadly, these are very real movements, people, and ideas we are dealing with, and it is becoming increasingly more important to both discount and discuss these ideas so we are not blindsided by a wave of neo-nazis. This is a hard line to walk, but I think a play like this could be just the answer we need.
The title of this article intrigued me, as I had never heard of this play before. I would really like to go and see it, but I wish this article provided a little more of a plot explanation. The article did, however, bring up some very interesting points. First of all, this play was originally preformed in 2014 as a satirical piece about the absurd explanations deniers used to try and prove that the Holocaust never happened. In 2018, however, it is being preformed in a way that is much more connecting to the current political world that we are living in - and that terrifies me. When we are in school, everyone always complains about having to take history classes and my teachers always told us that it was important to learn about history, so that the bad parts cannot be repeated. I really believe that many of the members of our current government did not pay attention in world or U.S. history, because the state that this country and world are in is getting scary.
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