Beowulf Alley Theatre Readers Theatre Presents Dachau by Jan-Ruth Mills
(Tucson, AZ-June 30, 2009) Beowulf Alley Theatre, 11 S 6th Avenue, 85701, downtown between Broadway and Congress, presents a reading of Dachau by Jan-Ruth Mills on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 7:15 p.m. Readers Theatre is a project to present nearly completed plays (mostly local Tucson playwrights) by actors reading the script before the public with a dialogue to follow providing comments and feedback for the playwright.
For additional information, please contact Jan Mills at jrmills@pima.edu or Gavin Kayner at brit4@mindspring.com. Synopsis of Dachau -Bavaria, Germany. July, 1947. A barrack in the former Nazi Concentration Camp Dachau now serves as courtroom for the US Military Tribunal prosecutions SS officers associated with the Gusen Concentration Camps in Austria. The council for the defense and the German civilian attorney can agree that their clients are guilty but disagree on everything from trial procedure to the legitimacy of the court itself. Despite the defendants’ unwitting confessions during their testimony, the defending attorney’s decades of experience defending murderers in the German criminal court system challenges the skills of Prosecutor, an inexperienced attorney from the States. complications arise with the presence in the court of the victims’ ghosts who are frustrated that they cannot give witness to the crimes against them in the court of the living and that their relationships to each other are complicated by their experiences at the hands of Nazi guards and by the choices they made in their failed attempts to survive. Caught between the living and the dead are an Austrian woman who still lives in the town near the Gusen camps and a Jewish woman whose two sons were murdered near the Austrian’s window. Both women find themselves transported in their dreams and daydreams to witness the trial among the ghosts. As the US court prosecutes the SS, the dead and the grieving mother conduct their own trial of the woman who witnessed their deaths but claims not to have been able to prevent them. Proceedings against the SS fail to bring the perfect justice the dead seek, the mother must accept she and her children will live with the guilt and consequences of her countrymen’s actions.