ORLANDO

Max and Rudy are not having a good morning.

When Max wakes up, he's so hung over that he can barely climb off the couch.

His lover, Rudy, knows all the embarrassing things that Max did the night before once he started drinking heavily at the nightclub, then began flirting with all the waiters.

But Rudy isn't all that keen to recite the gory details - that is, until Max threatens to do harm to Rudy's beloved plants, which Rudy is so devoted to that he names them and even calls him his best friends.

Max gets all the answers he needs when a stranger wanders into the room - the handsome young man that Max brought home the night before.

Max was so smashed he doesn't even remember meeting the guy. Too bad, as Rudy wryly notes, because Max conned the man home by insisting he was wealthy, with a luxury car and house in the country. This, for a gay couple three months behind on their rent.

The opening scene of Martin Sherman's play "Bent" is so comical - with the bumbling Max trying desperately to remember how badly he behaved under the influence, the dim-witted stud Wolf insisting they go see his big country home, and the fussy Rudy giving his poor plants a sip of coffee - that the play appears to be a classic bedroom farce, with poor Max's plight just getting worse.

When the doorbell rings and Rudy declares it has to be their landlord, demanding the rent, it seems Max has his work cut out for him repairing the damage from his night of binge drinking.

Max tries to convince Wolf he isn't rich, and to prove his point, he runs to the door to let that angry landlord in …

Only, his assumption is wrong.

Alarmingly wrong.

The transition "Bent" makes from these initially hilarious, campy scenes of post-booze humiliation to something quite different is shocking and devastating.

That's when you remember this is not a modern-day comedy, and that Max and Rudy are a gay couple living in Berlin. It's the 1930s.

Hitler is in power. And the Nazi party has made a pledge to eradicate socially undesirable people - homosexuals included.

Heavy drinking, rent-money woes and bringing home a date under false pretenses turn out to be the least of Max's problems.

Orlando's Empty Spaces Theatre company is producing "Bent," as part of the ongoing exhibit, "Nazi Persecutions of Homosexuals" at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center in Maitland.

The exhibit, created by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, uses reproductions of 250 historic photographs and documents to illustrate - in very grim, horrific detail - the Nazis' effort to eliminate homosexual behavior.

Sherman's 1979 play, produced on Broadway with Richard Gere and Michael York, was one of the first artistic efforts to chronicle the way that Hitler's Final Solution targeted more than Jews, and made gays a vulnerable target.

"Bent" is different from some other Holocaust plays. The classic stage drama "The Diary of Anne Frank" reproduces the writings of a young Jewish girl who, along with her family and other Jewish escapees, were forced into hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. For most of the play, the Nazis are nowhere to be seen; the child even continues to dream about falling in love, becoming a writer, and finding a happy life after the war.

Another play documenting this era is "Cabaret," which looks at the people who work at and play at a Berlin nightclub, including a bisexual American writer.

The Nazis are visible throughout the play, but mostly everyone ignores them, too consumed by drinking, sex and reveling in the club's decadent fun to worry about politics. It's only later, when a Jewish woman running a local boarding house plans for her wedding, that it becomes insidiously clear how deadly the Nazis agenda is.

"Bent" operates differently from those two. The initial scene has such a harrowing twist that it shocks us out of complacency - as rapidly as it does Max and Rudy, who go on the run, hoping to hide out in the countryside until they can earn enough money to get fake passports that will carry them out of Germany.

But every glimmer of hope they have gets dashed, and their situation becomes more and more hopeless. The concentration camp Dachau awaits them.

The first act, which chronicles in agonizing detail the way in which gay men faced unbearable terror at the hands of the Nazis, would seem hard to top once the second act, set in the death camps, begins.

What's surprising is that the second act becomes, uniquely enough, a love story, as Max finds himself emotionally, sexually and spiritually attracted to another death-camp inmate named Horst.

Their heartrending efforts to stay strong and uphold their growing commitment to one another - not to mention just staying alive - is quite powerful.

The performers do some commanding work in what are demanding roles, including Tom Mangieri as Rudy, who starts out as the more practical-minded of the two, nursing his hung-over boyfriend with hot coffee and eggs and cheese.

But as the Nazi web keeps tightening around them, Rudy - under Mangieri's fine work - becomes barely able to cope with the horror engulfing them and seems almost childlike in his desperation.

There are also small roles, with impressive acting, filled by Ofir Eyal as a drag-queen, cabaret singer who decides to go "straight" when he figures out that queer is no longer acceptable among the nation's new political leaders; John Bateman as the dim-bulb Nazi who dangerously flirts with homosexuality in violation of party rules, and falls for Max's con about his alleged wealth; and Dean Walkuski as a Nazi captain who comes to think Max has duped him, and decides to play a cruel and sadistic game as punishment.

His vicious sport will make you think about not just the Nazi death camps, but also remind you of recent events like the Abu Ghraib prison debacle.

Daniel Cooksley delivers another excellent performance as Max; this Theatre Downtown regular has already demonstrated his diverse acting skills in comedy ("Psycho Beach Party"), drama ("Take Me Out") and even science fiction (playing three cloned sons in "A Number").

His Max is a complex character who moves from party boy in the beginning to one who frets over whether he can afford the luxury of caring for and looking after the helpless Rudy, to using his skills as a con man to survive in the concentration camp.

It's his attraction to Horst that breaks down his emotional defenses and allows his steel exterior to crack, allowing for more visible emotional vulnerabilities; Cooksley is well equipped to dramatize every twist in Max's tortured path.

A bigger surprise is the very real dramatic skills of David Lee. The veteran playwright/director has usually given himself campy comedic roles, like his shark hunter in this year's Fringe Festival hit "Jawz The Musical."

Lee turns out to be a sharp dramatic performer as well, playing Horst, the prisoner who thinks he knows how to get by in a brutal death camp, but doesn't factor in his attachment to Max complicating things.

"Bent" is also a first-rate show because of the sound and lighting effects used to heighten the dramatic tension. They include everything from the loud, abrasive siren that signals the inmates to take a "break" - which consists of standing perfectly still for three minutes at a time - to the flashes of bright, red light that give the camp a sense of being in purgatory.

When Max and Horst spend a miserably hot summer day moving rocks from one location to another, you can practically feel the intense heat bearing on them, despite the theater's air conditioning.

"Bent" is playing for one more weekend, and it's a show you don't want to miss.



Michael W. Freeman can be reached at micheal.freeman@theledger.com or at 863-421-5577.

 

“ There's an air of inevitability about Bent , Martin Sherman's searing Holocaust drama, that makes any production of the play almost unbearable to watch…All of which proves the power of the Empty Spaces Theatre Company's gripping production and of Bent itself. Both are about more than whether men live or die – although that fact alone is plenty….To watch the remarkable scene in which Max and Horst transport themselves to another place – all the while standing a couple of yards apart on an almost empty stage – is to watch the imagination laid bare. Nothing can be more stunning than that.” – Elizabeth Maupin, The Orlando Sentinel

“Their heartrending efforts to stay strong and uphold their growing commitment to one another - not to mention just staying alive - is quite powerful…"Bent" is playing for one more weekend, and it's a show you don't want to miss.: - Michael Freeman, The Ledger