Playwright, screenwriter, author and director David Bar Katz loved comic books as a child, including those about superheroes. But one day a realization came to him.
“Almost everyone who created the first wave of superheroes was Jewish,” he told The Chronicle on March 11, during his visit to Milwaukee. “And that was not a coincidence.”
That knowledge has borne creative fruit in Katz’s 2010 play “The History of Invulnerability,” which the Milwaukee Repertory Theater will be producing beginning Tuesday, April 8.
Katz, 44, was in Milwaukee to attend the first rehearsals of the work. This production, he said, is the play’s third and its first on a large-scale stage.
The play tells the story of Jerry Siegel, the Jewish writer who with Jewish artist Joe Shuster in the 1930s created Superman, the first and still one of the most popular of all superheroes.
But the story is not told in a conventional form. Katz said he knew from the start that “I had no interest in doing a ‘biopic’” (biographical picture).
Instead, the play portrays Siegel’s “internal life” which was “more important than the details” of his external life, Katz said.
Katz has Siegel share the stage and hold conversations with his creations — Superman and the characters associated with him — plus members of his family, publishers, journalists, playwrights — and Nazis and Holocaust victims.
That the first modern superheroes appeared during the Nazi Germany era indeed was no coincidence, said Katz. Their young Jewish creators felt anguished that “they had no power to do or change anything” about the persecution of Jews in Europe. Therefore, “they created superheroes as pure, unconscious wish-fulfillment,” Katz said.
In fact, they also often felt helpless and powerless as Jews, as young people and as exploited artists in the harsh world of U.S. business practices. Siegel and Shuster were maneuvered into selling the rights to Superman for $130 and had to fight for years in courts to obtain credit for, and benefit from, their money-making creation.
Superhero characters ended up embodying something in the spirit of American culture at the time and after. “It is a hard thing for any of us to imagine that there was a time before superheroes,” Katz said. “In 1938, they didn’t exist. After that, they were everywhere.”
“And I think they changed everything,” Katz continued. “There is no coming-of-age story after 1940” that does not contain references to superhero stories in comics or elsewhere.
Reviewers of other productions seem to agree that Katz in his play understood and communicated the power of these figures.
“In my book, Bar Katz has X-ray vision to see into the human soul,” wrote Rick Pender in the City Beat of Cincinnati about the world-premiere production there in 2010, “and his powerful play should be required viewing.”
In a review of the Theater J production in Washington, D.C., in 2012, Gwendolyn Purdom in the Washingtonian wrote that the play “is eye-opening, leaping across an impressive array of thought-provoking issues in a single bound.”
And Milwaukee Rep artistic director Mark Clements, who is directing the Milwaukee production, in his recorded statement on the Milwaukee Rep website, said the play has “amazing story lines” and is “very complex, but gripping and innately theatrical…”
Katz was born in Philadelphia. He said he grew up in the Conservative movement and “spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who spoke Yiddish.” He apparently has theater yikkus (distinguished ancestry) in that his great-grandfather was a Yiddish theater producer in New York City.
He has written other plays and films (“The Pest”). He said that for the most part his work does not focus on Jewish themes, but does often include Jewish characters.
That has caused him to bump into “a strange double-standard” that persists even more than 50 years after “Fiddler on the Roof” supposedly shattered barriers to treating Jews on American stages.
“If there’s a Jewish character, it becomes a Jewish play,” Katz said. Whereas if a character is, say, Catholic and is shown going to church, that is “just background noise,” he said. “I get a lot of notes asking, ‘Can you take the Jew out?’” Worse, such requests often come from Jewish people, he said.
Katz also said he noticed oddly different reactions to “History of Invulnerability.” The mostly non-Jewish audience in Cincinnati seemed more accepting and not as concerned about the Jewishness of the story, he said.
The mostly Jewish audience in D.C., where the play was produced in a theater associated with the local Jewish community center, was incredulous about how Siegel and Shuster lost the rights to Superman, Katz said. “Didn’t they know any lawyers?” audience members asked.
The production runs from April 8 through May 4. Associated events will include a talk by Marc Tyler Nobelman, author of “Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman,” on Wednesday, April 9, 2:30 p.m., at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. Nobelman will also be present for discussion of the play after the April 9 performance that evening.
For tickets and more information, visit MilwaukeeRep.com or call 414-224-9490.
Loading ...