SALEM, Ore. — Director Susan Coromel withheld an important bit of news from the star of “Blonde Poison” as she performed the one-woman play in Salem.
Sitting in the audience, watching his father’s words come to life, was Oregon’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden.
The play is based largely upon “Stella: One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal and Survival in Hitler’s Germany,” a book written by Peter Wyden.
Stella Goldschlag was a German Jew who, to save herself and her parents, betrayed up to 3,000 Jews to the Gestapo during World War II. She was also a childhood schoolmate of the senator’s father.
Written by Gail Louw, the one-woman play is set in 1983. It depicts Goldschlag as she waits for a journalist, based on Peter Wyden, who is named Paul in the play.
As Goldschlag delves more deeply into her life, themes of betrayal, sexuality, family, power, survival and evil come to the fore. In a climactic moment of desperation, she asks the audience, “What would you have done?” But the playwright doesn’t let her off the hook. Goldschlag is exposed for the complex, human monster that she was. “It was a very good show,” Wyden said in a post-show interview. “It captured Stella’s life, which I always felt was a combination of desperation and denial.
“If you think both about the show and the book, you see Stella desperate to have this relationship with her child, who absolutely loathed her — I thought that was captured well — and then the denial, repeatedly saying things like, ‘My only sin was being beautiful.’ She is constantly trying to deny these horrendous acts.”
Wyden first learned of the play a month ago when the Jewish Journal featured a story about its American debut in Beverly Hills. He then read earlier this month that Verona Studio was staging a production at the Reed Opera House, the second in the country.
“We were honored that he would come to our theater,” said Randall Tosh, set designer and Verona board member. “I got a call from his office on Wednesday saying he’d read about this production in the Statesman Journal and wanted to get tickets. I was very tickled because it’s his father. It’s part of his story, and it’s part of Oregon’s story.”
After Thursday night’s show, Wyden visited with the production team. He commended Carol Adams Fritsche, who plays Goldschlag, for capturing the essence of the woman’s desperation and denial.
“OK. I’m done. I’m not doing any more shows,” Adams Fritsche said in jest after meeting the senator. “I’m so honored he would take the time to come … Thank goodness I didn’t know before the show.”
The senator recalled how his father said Goldschlag became reclusive and rarely went out in her elder years. Before the war, the boys had called her Marilyn Monroe. “As my dad used to say, ‘Every boy in the school ogled her morning, noon and night.’ ” As a Nazi informant, Goldschlag used those same good looks to entrap Jews who were in hiding.
“There are some really fascinating accounts of how Jews feel when they read the book,” Wyden said. He recalled a time his father was on a talk show, most likely Larry King, who had been interested in his dad’s historical writings.
“One night my dad was on with a survivor and the survivor said, ‘Peter, wonderful book, but you should have killed Stella when you went to her house,’ ” the senator said.
“My dad’s view was, ‘It’s indisputable how evil she is, but I’m a journalist and someone needs to tell the story so it will be less likely that fascism and people like Stella would return in another time.’
“Survivors thought it was an important book and liked my dad very much. There were not people screaming at my father,” the senator said.
“One of the reasons that this was such a powerful portrayal is that the richness of the character that Oregonians saw on stage tonight, to some extent, is possible because my dad did the investigative work and asked the hard questions. So, I’m going to be trying to pass that on to my children.”
As for Wyden’s review, he said, “I don’t know if senators are supposed to give stars, but I’d give it the maximum stars and tell everybody that this is very, very fine theater.”
