At first glance, Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy,” now in a superb revival at the Signature Theatre, has little to do with the present political scene. Written in 1964, the drama, set in an ominous detention center, deals with the roundup of Jews in German-occupied France in 1942. But a third of the way through the 90-minute drama, there is a provocative exchange among three of the ten detainees: Von Berg (Richard Thomas), an Austrian prince who is Catholic but whose class makes him a danger to the Nazis; Leduc (Darren Pettie), a psychiatrist and French war veteran; and Bayard (Alex Morf), a firebrand Socialist.Von Berg: I have a certain…standing. My name is a thousand years old, and they know the danger if someone like me is perhaps…not vulgar enough.Leduc: And by vulgar you mean…?Von Berg: Well, don’t you think Nazism…whatever else it may be…is an outburst of vulgarity? An ocean of vulgarity?Bayard: I’m afraid it’s a lot more than that, my friend…You make it sound like they have bad table manners, that’s all.”“It’s a chilling scene in a number of ways,” says Michael Wilson, who directed the production. “This play transcends partisan politics but I would say, as we watch the presidential race, we’re seeing an outburst of vulgarity. We’re not seeing statesmen arguing out of a passionate conviction but people who are appealing to the lowest common denominator.” The horrors of the Holocaust may be a long way from what many perceive as the current-day clown show of presidential politics on display in the media. But “Incident of Vichy” has another, altogether different resonance today than when it first appeared on the scene less than two decades after the end of World War II, when the extent of Nazi brutality was fully known. In Miller’s centennial year, where two of his better-known works are being produced — Ivo Van Hove’s brilliant and acclaimed revival of “A View from the Bridge” at the Lyceum and “The Crucible” on Broadway next year — “Incident at Vichy,” by one of America’s most ethical playwrights, has much to say to contemporary audiences about moral choices.It would be interesting to know what Miller would make of today’s blaring headlines of desperate refugees and immigrants coupled with incendiary political rhetoric. A reaction can be found in plays like “Vichy,” where he expresses the urgency of a moral response. The paucity of vision among leaders and the perversions that can occur in its vacuum are very much a part of the play, says Wilson, while pointing to another of Von Berg’s observations about the Nazis: “They do these things not because they are German but because they are nothing. It is the hallmark of the age — the less you exist the more important it is to make a clear impression.” Wilson is reluctant to weigh in on the substance of the political discourse, but says that a feeling of “nothingness” can lead to monstrous acts. “Shoot a television reporter on the air, kill of group of people at a bible study in a church, and you will be remembered forever,” says the director. “Burn some Jews in a furnace and no one will ever forget you. We’re living in an imperfect world of imperfect justice and Miller calls on people to respond to that.” Indeed, it is difficult not to think of the refugee and immigrant crisis when Leduc, the psychiatrist, says, “Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew. It is the other.”
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