Walpurgisnacht

By T.E. Kalem

BENT by Martin Sherman

Dachau: 1936. The sun is hellish. Two men in prison garb stand in front of an electrified fence. Max (Richard Gere) and Horst (David Dukes) must carry heavy rocks from one side of the prison yard to the other, drop them in a pile and then carry them back. This task of inspired idiocy is designed not only to break their bodies but to crush their minds and spirits. Their crime: being homosexuals.

The Nazis herded countless thousands of homosexuals into concentration camps. They were regarded as degenerates, polluting the purity of Aryan blood. That is the documentary origin of this gritty, powerful and compassionate drama.

Bent may be regarded as pro-gay in that it displays no social or moral qualms about anyone's being gay. But Playwright Sherman is not proselytizing. He wants to show us the brute cost of survival, the deep need and sustaining force of human affection in dire adversity and the taxing journey to the root core of one's identity. The play at Manhattan's New Apollo Theater achieves these ends, thanks in part to an arresting performance by Film Actor Gere (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Yanks). Even greater thanks are due David Dukes for his extraordinarily intuitive portrayal of Horst, a man rounded up by the state for having signed a petition demanding rights for "queers." To put this in proper historical perspective, some of the earliest Nazi party stalwarts were distinctly "bent." On the "Night of the Long Knives," June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered Ernst Roehm, left-wing head of the SA and a notorious homosexual fanatically loyal to the Fuehrer, murdered.

Bent does not begin in the death camp, but on a hung-over morning after a dissolute evening of booze, cocaine and sadomasochistic pastimes. The apartment of Max and his dancer-lover Rudy (David Marshall Grant) is broken in on by Storm Troopers. The two flee but are subsequently captured. The Nazi goons begin beating Rudy viciously and order Max to do the same. He begins in utter dismay, recognizes what he has been degraded to, and in an orgy of self-loathing deals his lover the final fatal blow. To amuse themselves further, the guards then order Max to undergo an appalling sexual test. He passes. The guards thought, as he tells Horst, " 'He's a bit bent.' They said, 'He can't' ... but I did." For his reward, Max is permitted to wear the yellow star marking him a Jew, which gives him preferential treatment over the homosexuals, who wear pink triangles.

Throughout the play, Gere handles the shadings of emotion superbly, especially in a scene in which he and Dukes stand several feet apart, not facing each other, and go through an explicit verbal depiction of oral sex all the way to its climax. Bent is not "entertainment" as the word is customarily used, but in its tensile strength and nervy risk taking, it is audacious theater.--T.E. Kalem

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