Way to Heaven

Odyssey Theatre

Los Angeles

(310) 477-2055

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The forced playacting of the Jewish prisoners at Theresienstadt may have been the “darkest perversion of theater” in history, said Charlotte Stoudt in the Los Angeles Times. When the concentration camp was visited by the Red Cross in June 1944, the Nazis disguised it as a “city for the Jews” in which inhabitants flourished under benevolent Aryan rule. For the prisoners, this was literally the “performance of their lives,” since revealing any hint of their actual suffering was punishable by death. In Way to Heaven, Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga explores the deception in two ways: by inviting the audience to examine the set and props before the play begins, and then through the eyes of a Red Cross worker looking back on his visit—“a trip he must make again and again in his mind, as he failed to see what was right in front of him.”

Way to Heaven nicely avoids “standard tropes of melodrama,” said Paul Birchall in LA Weekly. With Norbert Weisser serving as a “chillingly” genial Nazi host to Michael McGee’s aid worker, the story “loops back and forth” through time: “Gentle scenes of children playing onstage, or a young couple on a date, are replayed,” each time generating an increasing sense of terror. The play ultimately expands beyond its origins in a horrifying true story to become “a meditation on the nature of lying” and a searing satire of “the deceptive nature of theater itself.”