Ryan is a founding member of the Lexington, Kentucky theatre company called The New Performance Group, formed in 2005. Performing from the old courthouse in the Lexinton History Museum, group has plans for a number of dramas in in the coming seasons. Founded and Directed by Janet Scott, other Group members include Joseph Gatton, Michael Oaks, Sydney Shaw, Mike Thomas, and Susan Wigglesworth.
The following article about the Group and their premiere performance, written by Candace Chaney, appeared in the June/July 2005 edition of Nougat Magazine:
JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG:
History and Theater Converge in The New Performance Group
In 1947 U.S. Army photographer Frank Carpenter wended down the Rhine River on Hitler’s former yacht drinking Cokes with his army buddies. When he wasn’t cruising the Rhine, or riding bicycles through small towns with his German friend Manfried, he developed film that had been stolen from the Nazis. He has photos of many Nazis from the upper echelon of the party, including Hitler himself. In one photo, Hitler sits casually on a bench in his backyard with hi dog curled near him. Carpenter even developed the wedding photos of Hitler and Eva Braun. But that was a long time ago.
Now 77 and retired, he rides a motorcycle around Lexington, and, along with his wife, studies acting in the Donovan Scholar’s Reader’s Theater.
In late 2001, professional theater veteran Janet Scott fled the rubble and dust of post 9/11 New York to seek refuge here in the heart of the Bluegrass. With her she brought 20 years experience teaching acting, running her own theater, and producing original work. She was even trained by renowned acting goddess Stella Adler.
More than 50 years after the ink had dried on Frank Carpenter’s historical photos, and four years after the twin towers’ collapse filled the sky with plumes of smoke and soot, something miraculous happened here in Lexington.
History converged with theater as the Lexington History Museum hosted the birth of a local theatrical tour de force: The New Performance Group.
Founded and directed by Janet Scott, The New Performance Group comprises handpicked, professionally trained local actors (including Frank Carpenter) committed to producing quality theater.
Scott’s ambition to establish such a group had been simmering while she waited for the right moment. In the meantime, she trained actors using techniques drawn from her studies with Stella Adler, as well as her extensive performance career. She sponsored a showcase of her student’s work at the Downtown Arts Center, and she also taught the Donovan Scholar’s Reader’s Theater.
After a few years establishing herself in Lexington’s theater community, Scott recently decided it was time to see if the public was ready for the phenomenon that is The New Performance Group.
Well, ready or not, her they come.
Last month The New Performance Group launched its public debut by boldly targeting one of the darkest corners of human history – the Holocaust.
Ironically, the Lexington History Museum, which currently had an exhibit featuring Kentucky survivors of the Holocaust, graciously offered the group its beautiful third floor courtroom as a setting for a staged reading of Judgment at Nuremburg, by Abby Mann.
Set in post-World War II Germany (about the time Frank Carpenter was riding Hitler’s yacht), Judgment at Nuremburg recreates the famous Nuremburg was tribunals in which many top-tier Nazis were charged with, among other things, crimes against humanity.
Not knowing much more about the details of the play, I attended the reading with a half-excited, half-wary attitude.
On one hand, the fact that something new was stirring in the theater community excited me. On the other, I wasn’t sure what level of execution to expect in a staged reading as opposed to a full production. I thought I would see a production “in progress” – that the actors would be rusty and a bit fumbly, that the story might seem stilted or confusing since it was just being “read” aloud and not officially “acted”. I was ready to be supportive of process and lenient on product.
I could not have been more wrong.
Scott had assembled an ensemble cast with a level of talent, depth and training that no local stage has ever seen. Her Nuremburg courtroom was packed with established local actors like Joseph Gatton, Michael Oaks, Ryan Case, Sydney Shaw, Mike Thomas, and Susan Wigglesworth, and of course, Scott herself.
But before the production began, Scott briefly explained that one of the cast members, Frank Carpenter, had actually been in Germany at the time of the trials and even had photos of the original Nuremburg courtroom. He would be available after the show to share his photos and memorabilia with the audience. Immediately this piqued my sense of wonder – member of this play was actually there at the time of the trials and now here he was in a Lexington courtroom, helping to tell the story.
I felt a sudden chill of synchronicity, then sank into the performance, where I quickly fell under its spell.
While the play centered on the actually courtroom drama, it also touched on the individual experiences of ordinary Germans who knew nothing of the Holocaust, yet shared the collective guilt and suffered oppressive shame after the full scope of it was revealed. The audience was left scrambling for answers – for some kind of absolute moral lens through which to view the accomplices to history’s ugly inheritance. Did they know? Did they not know? How could they not know? And even worse, the dreadful musing – what things don’t I know about the atrocities being committed today? Further, the play begged the question – do people who are just “following orders” share responsibility for the grave atrocities committed in the name of their superiors? Are such people patriots – loyal and earnest – or are they traitors against humanity – ignoring the suffering and even massacre of others for personal or professional gain?
There were few dots to connect to see how this play was relevant to the current events.
However, this production was not a preachy diatribe against the ills of war. Instead, it examined with great subtlety the conflicting motivations, tragedies and limitations of the human condition.
Nowhere was this subtle power conveyed more poignantly than in Michael Oaks’ portrayal of Oskar Rolfe, the German lawyer charged with the task of defending high ranking Nazis like Ernst Janning and Emil Hahn against the charges of crimes against humanity. In a German accent that never wavered, Mr. Oaks delivered a passionate, visibly conflicted account of a German patriot’s attempt to reconcile the egregious missteps of his country.
I point out Michael Oaks’ mastery of one of the play’s primary roles, but each cast member gave a stellar performance. Not just stellar in the sense that they managed not to stink up the stage, but stellar in that they were trained professionals doing an obviously professional job.
Judgment at Nuremburg director Janet Scott defines acting as “real feeling in imaginary circumstances,” which is exactly what I witnessed. After seeing my share of wobbly acting, I rejoiced in seeing the real thing.
You could actually feel them feeling. They weren’t acting like they were acting. I did not have to make nice or salvage anyone’s budding artistry by thinking, “Well, you have to be willing to be a bad artist before you are a good one.” I just allowed myself to feel transported. I never had to make a grimace. This wasn’t just something I would generously describe as “promising.” This was the promise.
By intermission I was flabbergasted. A conversation I’d had earlier with a friend kept pressing my thoughts.
“Why,” my friend had asked, “exactly is theater important? We have movies now, they can even come in the mail. Why do we need theater?”
While I couldn’t yet articulate a sturdy answer, the experience of the reading kept swirling in my mind and I knew Nuremburg was nudging me nearer the answer.
As the show progressed – the light through the courtroom window waned sideways through the grand windowsills – casting gradual shadows upon the players in the courtroom.
The courthouse bells tolled three times throughout the production – providing an eerie reminder of the immediacy of each moment – of the fleeting way time passes. I thought of the Holocaust, its victims and aggressors, whether time really did heal. I imagined some mysterious stage manager in an invisible booth rattling off supernatural cues – “Eight o’clock…GO! Standby sunset.”
As the last bell tolled, the show had ended and Frank Carpenter was eagerly showing the audience his amazing personal collection of Nuremburg-era photos. Very casually he would say, “Here is one of Hitler and his dog, here is a medal awarded to German women for bearing many children for the Reich, here is a Hitler youth pin, here is a Nazi sword.” He even told us that he developed the wedding photos of Hitler and Eva Braun but that the Army “wouldn’t let me keep those…they were classified.”
I thought of how the very private, human side of evil was “classified” and how if we perhaps allowed ourselves to look on its ugliness, we might learn to face it ourselves.
Later that night I sat drinking in a pub feeling charged and dreamily connected to the whole of human history. I felt myself a part of it – that by viewing this production I had somehow interfaced with it in a personal way. I felt much nearer to the pulse of its existence – both past, present and future.
The answer to my friend’s questions rested somewhere in that experience. Really good theater, which maybe not many people have seen, literally required that you get out of your living room and engage your living imagination. It is in that space that we can authentically connect to each other, our shared legacies, good or bad, and our potential future.
As far as The New Performance Group goes, the stunning success of the Judgment at Nuremburg reading marks a triumphant beginning to an impactful, welcome theater presence in this town.
With an open invitation from the Lexington History Museum director Ed Houlihan to produce more courtroom dramas in “the old courthouse,” as some of us still call it, The New Performance Group is planning a series of courtroom dramas for the fall, with a production of Judgment at Nuremburg taking top priority.
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