Norbert Weisser and Bruce Katzman in "Way to Heaven"

Manipulation. To skillfully influence to suit one’s purpose. Deception. To mislead by false appearance and statement. Extermination. To eliminate the Jews.

Such is the makeup of Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s Way To Heaven (Himmelweg) currently performing through December 18 in its West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theatre.

Inspired by the true story of the elaborate deception that took place at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944 Germany, Mayorga’s non-linear, impressionistic play-within-a-play begins with an angst-ridden monologue by a Red Cross inspector, succeeded by a series of disconcerting tableaux in which a select group of imprisoned Jews play-act in order to create a “model village” for the inspector’s visit, thereby covering up the reality of the Holocaust.

Yet it is the 10 scenes that follow that give harrowing insight into the collaboration required in order to create this perverse faux-utopia for propaganda’s sake. The bulk of Mayorga’s play focuses on the camp commandant and a prisoner, Gershom Gottfried (the “Mayor”) – performed respectively by Norbert Weisser and Bruce Katzman – revealing that when one dances with the devil, complicity plays out in unnerving ways.

Different Directions, Same Destination

Bruce Katzman and Norbert Weisser

One year after the conclusion of WWII, Norbert Weisser was born in Neu-Isenburg, Germany. Raised in the confines of an oppressive and authoritative environment, Weisser had big dreams of leaving for greener pastures. Reflecting on his frustrations and on the re-integration of ex-Nazis into West German society, Weisser states, “My instructors were all teachers in the Third Reich. They may have changed their spots but only a little bit.”

As a 20-year-old, his dream came to fruition when he left for America. What did America offer? “All the symbols that meant freedom – cars, rock and roll, bobby socks, hula-a-hoops, jazz, Satchmo, movies, James Dean…” And because most of these phenomena were exemplified by sunny LA, that’s where he headed, initially on a tourist visa.

He had studied mechanical engineering at his father’s suggestion. It probably helped him get one of his first jobs in LA,  as an industrial designer for an aerospace company. But he slid into acting after being coaxed into a workshop led by James Whitmore and Ricardo Montalban.

Even back then, Ron Sossi, artistic director of the Odyssey and director of Way to Heaven, had an impact on Weisser’s life as an actor. “In 1969, Ron offered me the role of Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera and it was a hit, running a year. I realized this was fun and I was good at it.” Absorbing the LA experimental theater scene of the ’60s and ’70s, Weisser became a founding member of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, ProVisional Theatre and Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. Then came Midnight Express, with more movies to follow.

Norbert Weisser and Talyan Wright

Way to Heaven is hardly the first production that has employed Weisser in an examination of the Nazi era.  Earlier this year, he received an LADCC nomination for his role as the beleaguered householder in the Odyssey’s 2010 production of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, a play that’s often viewed as an allegory about the rise of the Third Reich.  In 2003 he received an Ovation Award [for Lead Actor in a Play] for playing a wartime German actor married to a Jew in John O’Keefe’s  Times Like These at the Odyssey [Laurie O’Brien also won for Lead Actress]. It ” was a career highlight,” he says. In 1996, he performed on Broadway with Ed Harris and Daniel Massey in Ron Harwood’s Taking Sides, which analyzed the behavior of German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler during the Nazi era.

With some pride he states, “For the last 40 years, I’ve made a living as an actor. I try to do theater at least once a year. It’s important.”

The self-effacing Bruce Katzman caught the acting bug at a much earlier age than Weisser. “I got bit when I was five and a half at summer camp. I was in a skit with my brother. It was funny, the audience looked at me and laughed, and I was hooked.” Katzman makes a point to express his gratitude for his family’s support throughout his life – “doing apprenticeships at theaters, studying acting at college,…” In 1988, he earned his MFA from the Yale School of Drama. For the past 12 years he has been a working actor in Los Angeles.

When asked what draws him to the stage, especially when 99-seat theater doesn’t pay the bills, Katzman replies, “Is the part going to be a challenge for me? Is this going to be exciting? It’s either got to be a role I can’t say ‘no’ to or be a play/production/director/theater that will feed my life in a special way.”

Weisser concurs. After he read his role of the Commandant, he concluded “‘I can’t turn that down.’ There are things in his speeches, primarily in the bookend speeches, I’ve never been able to say and express in any other play about the Holocaust. There is such density of things I’ve carried as a human being all my life. I was born right after the war, gifted with this ton of bricks of what my people, my parents, uncles, aunts, had participated in – directly or indirectly.”  Although his father was too old to serve in the military, an uncle was considered a war hero for his actions in fighting against the French. “In this role, there’s a way for me to lay that out, to express it.”

Why This “Way”?

David Valdes and Bruce Katzman

What is so special about Way To Heaven? Katzman shakes his head. “How Mayorga even thought to do this play in the first place is mystifying. The format is so unusual.” Weisser slides in with, “And courageous. Intriguing. The writer has drawn things from the Holocaust and put it together without the constraint to stay here realistically. It’s poetic.”

But another play or film about the Holocaust? Weisser leans forward. “The play goes beyond Theresienstadt and the Holocaust. It’s about all of us collectively agreeing to a scenario that goes on constantly. None of us wants to see the writing on the wall. We would rather not see it. If we see it, we would rather not talk about it or we suppress it. It gets into that ability we have as human beings to not see what is really in front of our eyes – the theater being played for us.”

Both Weisser and Katzman are quick to point out that the history of the circumstances surrounding this particular situation heighten the existing horror. The Third Reich goes to great lengths to pull the wool over the eyes of the Red Cross inspector by creating a façade – a Potemkin village built that includes a school, synagogue, town square, shops, a soccer playing field – then forcing the Jewish prisoners to persuade the observer, through various rehearsed scenes posing as slices of life, that the Jews are being held in humane conditions. In essence, everyone “acts” to cover up what is the actual truth.

The Cost Of This Dance

What about the relationship and moments on stage Weisser and Katzman have together? Katzman shares, “It’s yet another interesting aspect of this play; as actors, as characters, we both have such completely different points of view about the events happening. In order for us to come from the truth of our own characters, there is a place we cannot meet. The couple of points where I think there is a friendship or bond, he cuts me off at the knees.”

Weisser replies, “The Commandant just happens to have the power. He is a bully. Our relationship is between a bully and someone being bullied. There is a dance, an interplay, with manipulation and tension. It’s tricky.”

Bruce Katzman and Norbert Weisser

“And unsettling,” adds Katzman. Commenting on the charming, cultured, terrifying overseer o the camp, who fancies himself as a director and playwright, he continues, “The Commandant is a Nazi but he’s not a stereotype; he’s one-of-a-kind. Through his intellectual and artistic sensibilities, he’s able to justify everything his people are doing. He articulates very clearly and insidiously the arrogance, the self-appointed righteousness of the mindset of the people at that time, that government, regime, political entity, the Nazi Empire. This play is a well-written expression of the things those participants, those believers at that time, felt, thought, justified, how they saw it.”

Katzman remarks about the end of the play when Gottfried fine-tunes the performances of the prisoners with their assigned parts. “I actually repeat things the Commandant has taught me in prior meetings in his office. It’s sort of spooky how I’ve become his little puppet.” Under the Commandant’s thumb, the powerless Gottfried must make sure the Jewish actors do their part, follow the collaborated script laid out before them, giving the performance of their lives… and for their lives.

Katzman emphasizes that “the European problem with the Jews had existed for centuries. Centuries. What the Commandant says with such pride,… it was a matter of transportation. They figured it out.” Silence fills the back office of the Odyssey Theatre where the interview is being conducted.

Weisser’s voice carries sadness as he states, “That aspect of the Holocaust, to me, is the most daunting and troubling. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it – the industrial scale, the ability to look at it in terms of numbers and trains and movement, and completely dehumanizing the slaughter of human beings.”

Despite the evidence already in hand from other reliable sources, the Red Cross issued a 15-page report on the Theresienstadt concentration camp giving its approval that all was well between the Jews and Nazis.

The Audience Reacts

Talyan Wright

At the conclusion of each performance, the audience is invited to stay for a Q&A with the cast and director. “The audience members have this very intense experience,” says Katzman. “Sometimes they talk about what’s happened to them – whether they’re Christians or Gentiles who’ve had no history or idea of these events occurring, witnessing something for the very first time, to people who have been survivors themselves coming out of the concentration camps as young folks or relating stories about their parents or relatives who were there. It has been remarkable and rewarding.” Weisser affirms, “There is a need to tell their story, an urgency. And the complexities…Some people are just stunned.”

Katzman nods and relates how a friend, a prominent lawyer, couldn’t speak until 20 minutes after a performance. “His face was kind of a fog.”

Weisser relays a story regarding a personal friend. “She walked out after the break (intermission). She couldn’t take it, wasn’t ready for it. Luckily, for another friend of mine who was with her, I was able to drive him home after the show.”

Sometimes hostility makes its way into the post-show discussion. “There are audience members who can’t look at me,” says Weisser, “having such anger because I have humanized the Commandant. ‘How dare you do that?!?’ ‘He’s evil!’ Well of course he is, but he’s still human. You can’t separate it. Accept him as a human being who has his own torture, confusions, guilt and sadness.”

Weisser speaks on a broader scale. “If I show a human aspect to this character, all of a sudden the evil that’s done in this world is in all of us. Every possibility, everything, is in all of us. As long as we pretend that’s not the case, we’ll look at other people as ‘the other.’ That’s too easy. ‘It’s the Arabs, it’s the Jews, it’s the Palestinians, it’s the Germans, it’s the Mexicans, it’s them, it’s them, it’s them,…’ You have to say essentially, ‘No, it’s within me.’ It’s complicated.”

At The End Of The Day

A long day draws to an end – with a performance and Q&A already under the belt of Katzman and Weisser. Before rising from their seats, both actors profusely compliment Sossi for his direction and guidance, as well as the design team and other cast members, and for the opportunity to be in Way To Heaven.

Bruce Katzman and Norbert Weisser

Before the two performers exit the room and return to their lives outside the theater, they extend hands to one another and shake. Weisser says, “It’s such a pleasure.” Katzman smiles and agrees. “It’s a wonderful collaboration.”

Interesting. Could that brief exchange have been said almost 70 years ago in Theresienstadt between two men – a commandant and a prisoner – at the conclusion of their own performance for the Red Cross?  The repetition with a different meaning, hauntingly so? It’s unsettling to consider, yet in Mayorga’s world of puzzling pieces, it’s all the more gut-wrenching and possible.

Way To Heaven (Himmelweg), produced by Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Wed.-Sat. 8 pm; Sun. at 2 pm (except December 4 at 7 pm only). Wednesday performances on November 2 and 9 only; Thursday performances on November 17 and December 1, 8 and 15 only. Through December 18. Tickets: Wed.-Fri.: $25; Sat.-Sun.: $30. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 South Sepulveda Blvd., West LA. 310-477-2055 or www.odysseytheatre.com.

***All Way To Heaven production photos by Enci