Unlike Frank, Hillesum did not hide. She was able to protect herself and her family, for some time, by working for the Jewish Council - the Nazi-run bureaucracy that registered Jews for deportation, and ultimately, death.
This horrible irony was hardly lost on Hillesum, who tells us she is on a shipwreck, "saving one's self by pushing others into the water." She talks at times to "the deepest and best part of myself, which for my convenience I call God," and her story of the years between the Netherlands' Nazi takeover and her own climb aboard the train to her death is by turns chilling and enthralling.
Three years later, she and her immediate family would be murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland where she had been deported along with about three-quarters of the Netherlands’ 140,000 Jews.
- Howard Shapiro
$10. 5 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Sept. 16; 7 p.m. next Saturday and Sept. 17; 2 p.m. Sept. 12 and 15. Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 North American St.
Thom Pain (based on nothing). Now, we take a moment to tip our hats and send our condolences to Christopher M. Bohan, who performs his heart out as the monologuing man at the microphone in playwright Will Eno's grotesquely insipid Thom Pain. Luna Theater Company is presenting this Philadelphia premiere of the hour-plus piece, in which Bohan's character is a stand-up act, of sorts - a tedious mix of tuneless lounge-lizard, bore, schlub and cretin.
"I'll spare you the details. (Pause for a beat.) And the main parts," he tells us, then continues with both, and that quote is the sort of humor strewn repeatedly through the piece, which has its tiny moments, or maybe moment.
This Thom Pain has nothing in common with his sound-alike namesake, the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine, except that he employs the freedom of speech Paine so ardently championed. But Paine had much to say. Not only has the play’s character nothing to say - which is the point, itself pointless once the realization is instantly clear - but he states his nothingness in your face. Mildly curious the first time, excruciating the 20th.
Bohan tries to make this work at least as a character study, and he mostly succeeds on that level. As for the playwright, Eno, it's tough to discern what he tries for. He is, in the worst sense, trying.
- Howard Shapiro
$20. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, next Friday, next Saturday and Sept. 17 and 18; 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Thursday, Sept. 16 and 19; 2 p.m. Sept. 12. Upstairs at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.
