The Play That Saw Fascism Coming
Gavin Michaels, Ella Stevens, and Jack Mastrianni in the Mint Theater Company’s production of Sally Carson’s play Crooked Cross. Photo: Todd Cerveris Photography.
When Sally Carson’s neglected 1934 novel Crooked Cross was reissued in the UK earlier this year, its depiction of the rise of fascism in everyday life made it a surprise hit.
Set between December 1932 and August 1933, the book traces the unraveling of an ordinary German family as the Nazi Party consolidates power. It centers Lexa Kluger, a young woman caught between conscience and conformity when her fiancé, Moritz Weissman, is pushed out of a promising medical career due to his suspected Communist ties and Jewish surname. Meanwhile, Lexa’s brothers are drawn to the party’s promises of purpose and stability. With fascism encroaching and the Kluger and Weissman families growing apart, Lexa must confront the cost of survival in a collapsing democracy.
This fall, the Mint Theater Company, a nonprofit renowned for resurfacing forgotten works, is producing the long-overdue American premiere of Carson’s own stage adaptation of Crooked Cross. I spoke with Jonathan Bank, the Mint’s longtime artistic director and the director of this production, and dramaturg Amy Stoller, his collaborator of 29 years, about what makes the play so powerful.
DOUGLAS CORZINE: Jonathan, how did you hear about Crooked Cross?
JONATHAN BANK: There was an article in The Guardian. The day it appeared, I got two different emails from Mint regulars. The article was prompted by the republication of the novel, but the author spent a fair bit of time on the play. So the people who wrote to me said, “Can you find this play, and will you do it?” Something made them think it would be interesting, and I was attracted by the description as well.
Amy, when did you first discuss the play with Jonathan? What was your impression?
AMY STOLLER: A few months ago, Jonathan asked me to take a look. What I normally do as a dramaturg is look at “the micro.” I look into the things that, if I were an actor faced with the script, would make me ask, “What? What are they talking about?” And then I write up a glossary. Jonathan asked me to keep it lean for this play, and as soon as I read the play I saw why.
JONATHAN: I didn’t immediately go to Amy because it wasn’t specifically important to me whether Sally’s sense of historical events was 100 percent accurate. She was writing it at the time: she spent time in Germany, and these were her perceptions. So I felt like the novel was an adequate resource.
Then, at a certain point, I realized that when Gavin [Michaels, one of the actors] asks me, “So I’m a Storm Trooper, what am I doing at work every day?” And my answer is, “I don’t care,” that that was not nice. He should have somebody to address those questions. Now, I did give him a 700-page book on the history of the stormtroopers—
AMY: Which saved me having to read 700 pages.
But I have to say that when Jonathan first announced this play and he hadn’t asked me on board, I was like, “Gee, that’s too bad ... that would be really interesting to work on.” So I was thrilled when he brought me aboard.
I assume it’s an interesting period to research: Germany was changing so rapidly.
AMY: I put together a timeline. I have no idea whether any of the actors ever looked at it, but my job isn’t to force the information on the actors; it’s to make sure they have access to it, and if somebody asks a question, to do my level best to get them a useful, accurate answer. Once they know the answer, they don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s not getting in their way, and they can get on with the business at hand.
Crooked Cross largely depicts the Nazi Party’s rise from the periphery. Hitler is mentioned, but he’s never named. Jonathan, is that an example of self-censorship?
JONATHAN: It is. Any playwright was forbidden to mention or depict Hitler. That was the policy the Foreign Office handed down: “We wouldn’t want the Germans doing a play talking about the king. They are our ally, and hands off.” So all the dialogue in the play comes from the novel, but much of it was impacted by knowledge of what would be forbidden—I discovered a hundred instances where Carson shaved dialogue from the book.
A novel was understood to be less powerful than a play and was not subject to censorship. So, you said Hitler is referred to in the play. True, but we still don’t use his name, as Carson did in the novel. Carson changed “Carl’s girl only wants to talk about Hitler. German girls are not supposed to forget that he’s a bachelor” to “Carl's girl only wants to talk about your leaders. German girls mustn’t forget that some of them are bachelors.” I didn’t restore Hitler’s name, but I used the singular “leader.” The play is focused on the young Storm Troopers and not Hitler, and I felt leaving his name out helps our storytelling; but obviously the famous bachelor in the National Socialist Party was Hitler.
Liam Craig, Katie Firth, Gavin Michaels, and Jakob Winter in the Mint Theater Company’s production of Crooked Cross. Photo: Todd Cerveris Photography.
Another moment also struck me as a reference to Hitler, though more obliquely. When Lexa is alone with Moritz, she angrily muses that a Jew with a bomb should “put an end to all of this,” but he stops her and says it could embolden the Nazis. It’s not specific, but—maybe due to current events—it registered as an allusion to assassination. Do you think that’s what Carson intended?
JONATHAN: I don’t have reason to think that was a specific reference to assassination. I could search it, but I think those lines are... [He pauses to search the novel.] Oh, no, you’re right—here: “Why doesn’t a Jew throw a bomb at Hitler and stop all this?”
It’s interesting that you weren’t thinking of it that way.
JONATHAN: For me, truthfully, the idea that in 1933 she was writing [Moritz’s response to that line, which says that] not one of us would be alive today if that happened—we’d all be killed—was my takeaway. The specific suggestion of an assassination is kind of less impactful for me than the response.
AMY: There’s historical background because whenever things went spectacularly wrong, for example, the Reichstag fire, they blamed the Jews—or they blamed the Communists.
JONATHAN: They blamed the Communists.
AMY: But that was code for Jews, because in Hitler’s world, they were nearly identical. You hear in the play how those concepts are conflated and nobody questions it. If you teach a first-aid class at a worker’s education center [as Moritz does], you are branded as politically aligned with the center, which is set up by—or plausibly set up by—the Communist Party.
Another thing that stuck out to me is what Lexa’s father says about foreign papers reporting current events more clearly than the German press. Did you expect that moment to hit so hard?
JONATHAN: I understood the reason that two people read that Guardian article and asked me to find the play. Nicola Beauman, who is the owner and editor of Persephone Press [which published the re-release] is 80. She said explicitly that it’s a book she read years ago, and now is the time to bring it out again. So one certainly anticipates the context in which certain things will ring in certain ways.
But I specifically avoided talking about that timing in the rehearsal room. To me, the play required that we not look ahead to anything that came after August of 1933: not to the next 10 years, but also not to 2025.
But I understood that there might be resonance. The play is describing shutting down dissent—any newspaper that might state facts other than the state-sanctioned facts was wiped out.
Amy, how much had the freedom of the press eroded in Germany at that point?
AMY: The Nazis hadn’t quite taken over all the newspapers, but they were well on their way. The Communist newspapers were shut down immediately, and that’s where most of the criticism would have come from.
JONATHAN: You know, look at the lack of free expression in England: you could not produce a play that used the name Hitler. You couldn’t produce a panto that involved a toothbrush mustache. In a way, my takeaway is that freedom of the press in America is unlike freedom of the press anywhere else. The freedoms we’re trying to protect now are freedoms that even England didn’t have.
AMY: The writing was on the wall. The bottom line is that Sally is a reliable reporter, and she may have compressed the real-world timeline a little bit to make the play’s storytelling timeline work a little more smoothly, but she has not fudged by much: a week or two here or there.
Jonathan, you said that when this was written, a novel was understood to be less powerful than a play. What do you think is special about seeing this onstage, even as the novel has been reissued?
JONATHAN: A novel takes place inside your head as you read, and a play takes place in a room filled with other humans. I understand whoever decided plays needed to be censored, because if you have a few hundred people in a room hearing something and responding to it, you don’t feel like, “Well, it’s just me.” You know it’s not. I guess that can be dangerous.
AMY: It’s visceral. If you’re in a room with other people and with actors, you can’t flip pages ahead to find out how it ends. You have to live through that moment.
This interview has been edited and condensed.