Brutal. Gruesome. Frightening. Ten minutes into the Mark Taper Forum revival of Martin Sherman’s Bent, I sat frozen in my seat, clutching Thom’s hand beside me as Nazi soldiers burst from the audience and into the action on stage. By intermission, I had to convince myself to stay for Act II. Having seen the 1980 Broadway production starring the late, wonderful David Dukes and Richard Gere, I was shocked to find that all I truly remembered of the piece was the central love story. Forgotten was the violence, the terror, the sickening perversion of the Nazis, so graphically depicted in Sherman’s book. Bent begins with the kind of bawdy humor commonly found in romantic comedy or even farce. With full frontal nudity (and I do mean ‘full’), and quippy jokes, the audience is seduced into the kind of open posture that follows laughter, only to be jerked into gasps of horror. Nice work, Sherman.
The curtain rises on the morning after a blackout night of drinking, as roguish Max (Patrick Heusinger) in a hung over stupor, is surprised by the presence of the handsome piece, Wolf (Tom Berklund), he brought home the night before. With a large chip on his shoulder, Max’s gentle partner, Rudy (Andy Mientus) endures the intrusion. They are none the wiser that Wolf is a hunted member of the SA in the Night of the Long Knives. Max and Rudy flee their tiny Berlin apartment, hiding in the forest until captured by the Nazis. Rudy is lost on the road to Dachau. Max is taken to the camps where, having been given the idea that gays were held in even lower esteem than Jews, he schemes to get the yellow star of a Jew rather than the pink triangle of a gay. He engages the attention of fellow prisoner, Horst (Charlie Hofheimer), who wears his pink triangle as a matter of principled pride.
Hofhiemer does not fill the very large shoes left by David Dukes; instead he leaves them in the past with Dukes’ memory, and brings his own witty, strong voice to Horst, forging his own esteem. Somehow, he takes the audience along as he leads Max into ecstasy without gratuitous salaciousness. What follows is the story of two men who find the defiant dignity of love in a surreal nightmare of circumstance designed to strip them of all humanity, of all reason, of their very persons.
Heusinger scales the long character arch of Max as if with wings on his back. The moment Max must describe the despicable act he performed to attain the yellow star is devastating. In the end, Max’s personal transformation is not simply a device of good text; it is the logical conclusion of the journey well taken by the actor. Andy Mientus keeps Rudy sweet and loveable all the while showing flashes of his still adolescent impetuosity. Tip of the hat to Jake Spears of Scissor Sisters (Greta) for his elegant step from rock and roll to the Taper stage.
Sherman uses an assumption of a kind of hierarchy of prisoners, whose treatment is based on the color and shape of their assigned badge. It is a useful dramatic device that serves the story, however the clear bell of history rings with the reality that the atrocities of the Nazis were more often as horrifying to one prisoner as they were to another regardless which of the many badges they wore. Sprung from evil, the actions of the Nazis were neither consistent nor predictable, as Sherman shows in the final betrayal by the Nazi Captain (Hugo Armstrong). It was the unchecked chaos of unbridled whim trickled down from Hitler through his officers.
In this, its first major U.S. revival since its debut, Bent is as timely as it ever was. In 1980, it elevated the pink triangle to a badge of pride for the gay rights movement of the time. Here in the summer of 2015, Bent reverberates a kind of all encompassing hatred seen today in the persecution of Gays, Jews, and Christians, in parts of the Middle East, and inching its way into Europe.
At its core, though, Bent is an unforgettable story about the indomitable, enduring power of love.
Photo cred: https://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/mark-taper-forum/2015/bent/