Theater Review: A Prescient, and Newly Relevant, Warning About Fascism

For 30 years, the Mint Theater has specialized in rediscovering plays often unfairly confined to the dustbin of history. In my experience attending nearly 20 of these shows, I’ve found them lovingly and shrewdly presented.

But no production of this Off-Broadway company has struck me so powerfully as Crooked Cross, which has not been revived in the UK since its 1937 premiere at London’s Westminster Theatre—and not produced at all in the US till now.

This drama by British author Sally Carson about the rise of Nazism in the critical December 1932-summer 1933 period only runs through today, so many readers will not be able to see it before it closes.

Even so, I urge you to buy the 1934 novel that she herself expertly adapted, which Persephone Books republished this past April. And while you’re at it, buy another copy for friends still open to understanding its message for today—and, if Persephone gets around to reissuing them, its two sequels: The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938).

The drama has turned up again at a time when, like Germany transitioning from the Weimar Republic, Americans are unsettled by economic dislocation and a relative loss of power in the world—and decide to embrace a nationalist leader willing to break norms and laws at lightning speed.

A publisher’s reader and dance teacher when the novel and play of Crooked Cross were created, Carson had little time to establish herself in the literary world. Starting a family in 1938, she died of breast cancer only three years later, only aged 38.

By that time, the world was so caught up in maelstrom of fighting the Axis powers that it forgot about the English Cassandra whose warnings were disregarded by a war-weary electorate and appeasers in Whitehall.

Crooked Cross starts like a Christmas romantic comedy, with Lexa Kluger, a vibrant twentysomething woman hanging ornaments with her parents, two brothers and her fiancée, Moritz Weissmann, in their Bavarian home.

Over nine scenes, the tone becomes more like a thriller or horror film, with lives at stake and darkness spreading over their picturesque mountain community of Kranach and their country.

Carson outlines, step by step, how large national events shatter this harmony. Moritz loses his promising job as a doctor in a prestigious hospital because of his Jewish background and teaching first aid to a Marxist audience. Moritz’s father is not only dismissed from his university job because of his religion but is seized and disappeared by the newly empowered Nazi regime.

The trends highlighted by Carson will seem all too familiar to many today:

*A suddenly restrictive border policy meant to punish a minority;
*A new government that uses the slenderest of pretexts to reduce opposition;
*Nationalist right-wing groups willing to overthrow the government;
*Universities that cravenly yield to government pressure.

But what will especially strike a chord with modern audiences is Carson’s psychological understanding of what gives rise to authoritarianism, and the divisions it causes in families.

The Klugers react differently over how to deal with the ascendant Nazi Party. Frau Kluger (played by Katie Firth) nags her husband into joining it. Their son Erich (played with chilling authority by Jakob Winter) embraces Hitler’s principles and strategies with fanatical devotion, while second brother Helmy (Gavin Michaels), though closer to Lexa and Mauritz, swallows his ambivalence in the hope that the party will provide income and a purpose that’s been missing from his life.

Lexa will have none of this. She struggles to make her family grasp the dangers posed by Nazism to the man she loves—and when they urge her to transfer her affection to a nice Aryan youth, Otto, she moves from tense, even barbed, remarks (e.g., telling Erich, a former ski instructor whose work with aging female customers involved more than athletics, “I don’t imagine the Storm Troopers are immune to your charms”) to an outbreak break with them all.

Crooked Cross now plays to audiences passing an awareness of outcomes that British theatergoers of the prewar period could not have possessed, and it is staged now without imposing such retrospective historical knowledge.

In light of that, Carson’s insights are all the more prophetic and prescient, particularly in the damage caused by a nihilistic rejection of imperfect but irreplaceable representative government. Lexa’s question to her siblings reverberates as much now as in the 1930s: “When you’ve broken everything you can touch, all of you — what do you think you’ll do then?”