The Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts are as uplifting a place as there is to find oneself in June, and hardly someplace that summons to mind the bitter battles for America’s soul presently being waged. There’s a kind of moral hand-to-hand combat going on within the country. Which side ultimately prevails — rededication to tolerance and truth-telling, on one hand, or venom and conspiracy theories, on the other — remains very much a jump ball.
The Berkshires are known for the explosion of performing arts during the summer months.
Among the artistic institutions that attract the highest quality talent is Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company, which chose to begin the season by staging a revival of the musical non-comedy “Cabaret,”‘ a deeply sobering portrayal of Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s. It centers on two characters, Clifford Bradshaw, an American who has come to Berlin to write, and Sally Bowles, an English entertainer who headlines a raunchy nightclub. It is principally through these two characters that the story of the metastasis of Jew hatred in Nazi Germany, which would lead to the extermination of six million European Jews, is told.
“Cabaret” seems to have been a purposeful choice given the “tsunami of anti-Semitism,” as Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt has put it, convulsing America. This particular production opened contemporaneously with the criminal conviction of the neo-Nazi gunman who killed 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. That killing is just one stitch in a tapestry of anti-Jewish terror of the sort that has never been seen in America before, emanating both from White supremacists on the far Right and some of those who look into their mirrors and manage to see “progressives” on the Left.
The ADL’s tracking of antisemitic incidents in the United States tells part of the story. The approximately 3,700 incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault targeting Jewish people formally reported last year represent a 36% increase over 2021. The number has steadily increased year after year. But hatred of Jews is hardly the only kind of hatred that has prospered here in recent years. According to statistics recently released by the FBI, reported incidents of hate crimes more generally increased about 12% between 2020 and 2021. Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans, Muslim Americans and LGBTQ+ Americans join Jewish Americans as the most popular victims.
America has been a favorable spawning ground for hatred these last years, with the inhibitions against taunting and bullying not merely lifted but shredded. Roughly half the country embraces a cult that relishes in-your-face cruelty toward the marginalized. Threats against public officials struggling to protect the public health against COVID-19 and calls for the banning of books are somehow touted as pro-American. Comparisons between 1930s Germany and present-day America, which once seemed melodramatic, no longer do.
“Sally, don’t you understand that if you’re not against all of this, you’re for it?” Bradshaw asks Bowles toward the end of the play, but the question falls as flat as it has generally fallen when posed today. The chilling Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” evokes the crazed fervor of this country’s domestic extremist groups operating under rocks — but operating nonetheless — throughout our land.
The warning attributed to philosopher George Santayana that “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” resonates as much now as ever. One leaves “Cabaret” feeling that it needs to be seen less by those middle aged and older than by younger Americans, who are so spectacularly ignorant about the extermination of 6 million Jews and about the domination of Europe by fascists a mere 80 years ago.
The Barrington Stage Company’s production of “Cabaret” is simultaneously sparkling and deeply dark. “I was dancing with Sally Bowles, and we were fast asleep,” laments Bradshaw as he prepares to depart the horror he has seen consume Berlin. Four generations later, in a country we all thought was comfortably safe from being overrun by hatred, the question whether America will sleep on or awaken is an open one.
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