After an alarming vacation in Germany, British writer Sally Carson wrote “Crooked Cross” about the rise of Nazism as told through its effect on one ordinary German family.  It was published as a novel in 1934; the following year,  she adapted it into a play. Both versions were long forgotten until now. The novel was republished five months ago to great acclaim.  The play is opening tonight for the first time anywhere since 1937, in the latest of the Mint Theater Company’s sturdy restorations on a budget. It is, as usual for Mint productions, impressively performed and well designed. But, if the point in reviving Carson’s 90-year-old story is to offer a relevant lesson in the process and impact of an authoritarian takeover, there is something missing in the translation from novel to play.

“Crooked Cross” the play is primarily the love story between Lexa (Ella Stevens), the only daughter in the Kluger family, and her fiancé, Dr. Moritz Weissmann (Samuel Adams.)  The first scene takes place on Christmas Eve 1932, with Moritz and his father Professor Weissmann (Douglas Rees) decorating the Christmas tree and singing carols with the Kluger family in their home in a small town in the Bavarian Alps 

On New Year’s Eve the following week, Lexa and Moritz plan to watch the fireworks on the mountain, when Lexa spots what looks like a bonfire.

“It’s not a bonfire,’ Moritz says. “It’s a crooked cross – a swastika.”

Lexa barely reacts: “I expect Erich’s there – he’s the newest recruit, you know.” Erich (Jakob Winter) is one of her two brothers.

The young couple then exchange observations, supposedly just about the bonfire, that sound like foreshadowing:

Moritz: “It will run itself out in a little while, you’ll see. The sky will grow dark again and they’ll forget all about it….”
Lexa: “But it’ll make a horrible mark on the mountain.”

Moritz was raised Catholic by his (recently deceased) mother, but his father is Jewish, so Moritz is viewed as a Jew. This becomes increasingly a problem for him and for Lexa and Moritz’s relationship over the six months of 1933 in which the play unfolds, leading eventually to tragedy.

The plot might have seemed bold, even provocative, or at least a revelation in 1935.  Now the series of events strike us as so inevitable that it all seems to move slowly. The most intriguing aspect of the production for me is in the character of Lexa’s other brother Helmy (Gavin Michaels.)  Like Erich, he becomes a uniform-wearing Nazi stormtrooper, but unlike Erich, he doesn’t seem particularly won over to Nazi ideology. He always had a close bond with his sister, and a strong friendship with Moritz, and he doesn’t reject either of them; his main effort is to try to protect them, at first by trying to get them to break up.  He’s become a Nazi, we see, to have a job and a purpose, after a long period of unemployment and aimlessness.  

Such casual acceptance by the Kluger family (and others) of the ugliness of the Nazi regime is better developed with the extra time and space and depth of focus that the novel affords.  In an article in the New Yorker about the book’s republication, Rebecca Mead writes: 

“For modern-day readers, the novel is more than merely a historical curiosity; rather, as the critic Laura Freeman writes in her introduction, ‘It is a book that asks what you would do if the world went crooked, if the people you loved were persecuted, if the freedoms you believe inviolable were destroyed.’ One might challenge Freeman only on her use of the conditional tense: that this is already a crooked world is hard to deny.”

 “Crooked Cross” the play is more of a historical curiosity. It might be best appreciated as a sort of engaging preview that encourages us to get ahold of “Crooked Cross” the novel.

Crooked Cross
Mint Theater at Theatre Row through November 1
Running time: Two hours, including an intermission
Tickets: $39 – $95
Written by Sally Carson based on her novel
Directed by Jonathan Bank
Alexander Woodward (scenic design), Hunter Kaczorowski  (costume design), Christian DeAngelis (lighting design), Sean Hagerty (sound design), Chris Fields (prop design), Joey Moro (projection design), Stephanie Klapper (casting director). and Amy  Stoller (dramaturgy).
Cast: Samuel Adams as Moritz Weissman, Liam Craig Kluger, Katie Firth as Frau Kluger, Jack Mastrianni as Otto, Gavin Michaels as Helmy Kluger, Ben Millspaugh as young man, Douglas Rees as Professor Weissman, Ella Stevens as Lexa Kluger, and Jakob Winter as Erich Kluger