Tom Dugan as Simon Wiesenthal in his one-man play. Photo courtesy The Wallis
By Steve Simmons- Published 1:02 p.m., Oct. 19, 2020
Simon Wiesenthal is coming back to The Wallis Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Except this time, it’s virtual.
Actor-playwright Tom Dugan presented his acclaimed one-man show about the famed Nazi hunter in a sold out run at The Wallis in 2015. So now, The Wallis is offering audiences the chance to see award-winning Wiesenthal, available digitally, Oct. 20-27. (For details, see below.)
The digital engagement is a live performance videotaped during the show’s New York premiere Off-Broadway run in 2014 at the Acorn Theatre. Hosted by actress Blythe Danner, the show was originally broadcast in New York City on the Off-Broadway showcase Theater Close-Up.
“I was talking to Paul Crewes (Wallis artistic director),” says Dugan. “and I said, ‘hey, you’re showing a lot of stuff on your streaming platform and this would be great.’” He credits Wallis Associate Artistic Director Coy Middlebrook with “cutting through the red tape and getting PBS to release the rights.”
“Since that 2015 production people—especially from the Jewish community– have asked when it was coming back to L.A.,” says Dugan. “So I’m excited for people to see the filmed version. It’s high quality and I’m proud of it; it’s not diminished.”
Wiesenthal has its roots in Southern California and specifically Beverly Hills where Dugan, part of the Theatre 40 company, was starring as Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee. “David Hunt Stafford (artistic and managing director) asked me if I wanted to do the play on off nights and I said ‘yes,’” Stafford recalls. “No one expected it would catch fire.”
After a glowing review in the Los Angeles Times, Dugan carried the play “from one equity production to another.” Producers Daryl Roth and Karyl Lynn Burns took the show to New York where it was nominated for both New York’s Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award, as well as the Los Angeles Ovation Award and won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award.
“It’s been a whirlwind journey and I’ve become a legitimate playwright,” says Dugan. He’s done 500 performances throughout the U.S. and in Italy, Spain and Mexico touring with a set by scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, dominated by a large map and hundreds of books lining the onstage shelves.
He hopes to travel to Israel for the opening of the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, scheduled for next year, COVID-19 restrictions notwithstanding.
The Nazi Hunter At Work
In the play, it’s April 2003 (two years before his death) in Wiesenthal’s Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna on his last day of work. He often invited students, and this day he’s discussing his life and answering questions from another group. “The audience becomes his last visitors,” Dugan says.
The 90 minutes of action, cut from an initial two acts, take Wiesenthal from his time in concentration camps to learning the trade of Nazi hunting. He discusses famous cases from Adolph Eichmann ,Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the Treblinka death camp, the search for Karl Josef Silberbauer, the officer who arrested Anne Frank, through the catching of his last one before walking out the door.
But it’s not just a play of remembrance, Dugan reveals, because during the play Wiesenthal, nicknamed “the Jewish James Bond,” a Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to bringing more than 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice after WW II, is tracking, via phone, the highest-ranking Nazi war criminal still alive at that time, Alois Brunner. “So it’s part memoir and part spy thriller as Wiesenthal gathers evidence and the audience follows his progress as he narrows down where Brenner is,” Dugan says.
Brunner, Eichmann’s’ assistant, was responsible for sending more than 100,000 European Jews to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe. “So the play keeps audiences in suspense, asking ‘is he gonna get him,’” Dugan says. “All of my one-person plays are unique in that it’s not just a series of ‘then I did this and then I did that’ stories. There’s strong conflict and strong urgency; people are on the edge of their seat to see if it’s going to work out or not.” He’s also written plays about Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert E. Lee and Frederick Douglass. “I like good stories,” adds Dugan. “Most people think they know all about these people. But when we dig down and learn, it’s a completely different story.”
Dugan also describes the show as a “balancing act” to do service to the subject matter without being so graphic that it turns audiences off. “It’s quite a dance,” he says. “But I still suggest the show to young teenagers.”
“People think a show about a Nazi hunter will be a drag, but it’s also highly entertaining,” Dugan says. It even includes humor since Wiesenthal was an amateur comedian before the war, a fact many new to the show don’t know.
Dugan recounts how Rabbi Marvin Heir, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance, came to see the show and jumped on stage after the show. “He grabbed my hand and said, ‘Simon would kvell.’ Then he told me eight filthy jokes that Simon told him.”
The show has also been embraced by those who worked with Wiesenthal. In the play, Wiesenthal describes how he paid an informant $7,000 to get Stangl’s location. In a talk-back after a show in Florida, a man told Dougan how much he liked the story. “I asked him why and he said, ‘I’m the guy who wrote the check.’”
The fan turned out to be Mary Rosen, Wiesenthal’s best friend and attorney for 30 years. The money enabled them to track Stangl in Brazil, says Dugan. He was convicted and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment.
“Marty was vital when it came to important things like changing the statute of limitations in Germany in 1965,” said Dugan. “All Nazi criminals were about to be let free. If that had happened, Nazi criminals could have made a fortune writing books. Marty put the kibosh on that. He and Wiesenthal flew to Germany, spoke with the chancellor and got him to abolish the limitation, which allowed Wiesenthal 40 more years to do his work.”
“Marty’s enthusiasm for the show is pure and extreme,” says Dugan. “He didn’t want Simon’s words to die with him.”
Alison Pure-Slovin, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Midwest Region in Chicago is writing the forward for the published version of the play for Bashert Book Publishing, featuring photos from the New York production. She told Dugan the center got more volunteers, just from people who had seen the play and wanted to help. “We really are making a difference. The play effects people and they want to take action.”
A Family Connection
Dugan feels a connection to the material. His father, recipient of the Bronze Battle Star and the Purple Heart, helped liberate Langentsein-Zwieberge, an under-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. “I grew up with stories of a 19-year-old witnessing the greatest of heroism meeting the greatest of cowardice. I was always struck by the fact that he didn’t hate Germans even though he carried shrapnel in his hip,” reports Dugan. “I didn’t understand his attitude until I read a Wiesenthal obituary that talked about his rejection of collective guilt.
“Wiesenthal dismissed the idea that all German are bad,” Dugan says. “Wiesenthal was insistent that each individual is responsible for his or her own actions. He didn’t believe in sweeping condemnation of a group or people, he believed in collective responsibility. I didn’t understand what my father’s attitude, but I understood what he meant when I read Wiesenthal’s obituary.”
Lessons For Today
The more than 10 years since the play’s inception have not dimmed its relevance. “Wiesenthal’s message of tolerance has taken a real dive lately,” says Dugan, “and people are comforted by the logic of working as a team against the bullies of the world. And Wiesenthal described Hitler as the world’s greatest bully. But there’s always a bully to take over. His message is to continually get out there and stand up to them.”
According to Dugan, Wiesenthal said many times that when problems rear their ugly heads he was never surprised. It reinforced his message of education. Much of his work, and covered in Wiesenthal, is his dissection of how the perfect storm of the Holocaust can happen again if good people do nothing.
“Apathy gets filled in by the human savage in society,” says Dugan, “and the way to battle the human savage that lives inside all of us is to battle apathy. And there’s no better way to battle apathy or human savage–that tendency to revert to the primate that we all came from–than to vote.”
In real life, in one of Wiesenthal’s sessions, Dougan recounts, a student asked, “Mr. Wiesenthal, how would I respond if I lived in Nazi Germany at that time, would I follow along or would I be brave?” Wiesenthal reportedly responded. “How do you stand up to intolerance right now? That’s how you would have responded then. It’s an honest question,” says Dugan. “The play challenges audiences to examine their conscience right here and now.”
A popular feature of the show has been the talk-back afterwards, after Dugan has removed the make up and fat suit he wears in the production. (He also shaves his head and adopts an Austro-Hungarian accent he worked with a dialect coach to perfect.)
After a performance in Florida during the post-show talkback, an old man stood up and told Dugan, “thank your father for me, he liberated me,” Dugan remembers. “My father’s 83rd Infantry Division saved him. My father has been dead for 18 years and to have this man send thanks to him through me was magical.”
He and Crewes are hoping to schedule a talk-back for one night during the virtual run.
Moving Forward
Dugan has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with The Wallis. His Jackie Unveiled about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis played there in 2018. He’s keeping the play alive in his COVID-19-friendly backyard theater with performances for 16 with masks and social distancing. “Reviewers are coming to Woodland Hills,” Dugan reports.
Dugan’s latest play, set for The Wallis next year, is Tevye in New York, a non-musical that follows the Fidler on the Roof protagonist and his family after “they’re kicked out of Russia.”
Dugan’s been rehearsing via Zoom with the National Theatre in London’s Michael Vale, the show’s co-director and designer. “Paul thought we would be a good match and we’ve hit it off beautifully,” says Dugan.
Tickets are $50 per household and may be purchased at www.TheWallis.org/Wiesenthal. Ticketholders can stream the digital program for a 24-hour period beginning at 10 a.m. on their date selected, Tuesday, Oct. 20-Tuesday, Oct. 28.
