INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT STEVEN LEVENSON
Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with playwright Steven Levenson about his play If I Forget.
Ted Sod: What inspired you to write If I Forget? What do you feel the play is about? Does the play have personal resonance for you and, if so, how? Steven Levenson: For a long time, I’d wanted to write a play about the ways in which the Holocaust continues to linger and resonate in American Jewish life today. I know it has in my family. And I wanted to write a play about what it meant to be an American Jew at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the new millennium. A lot of the debates that happened around Jewish identity in my parents’ generation—debates about intermarriage, secularism versus religion—felt like they’d been settled, or at least argued to the point of exhaustion. I wanted to talk about the new fault lines, the new conversations that were happening.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to set the play amid the general disillusion and cynicism that set in after the failed Middle East peace talks of 2000, because in hindsight that really felt to me like a bellwether moment when a certain kind of idealism for American Jews died. From that point on, it seems, the conversation around Israel and what it means to be an American Jew has fundamentally changed. We could no longer continue to have blind faith that these issues would work themselves out with enough determination and good faith. The Oslo Accords, those images of Arafat and Rabin shaking hands on the White House lawn, created such a sense of promise and possibility, and all of that collapsed with the failure at Camp David in 2000. It forced some difficult soul-searching, which in many ways we’re still grappling with now. I was ten when the Oslo Accords were signed, and so much of my Jewish education was inflected with the optimism of that moment—peace was just around the corner. I was sixteen when the Camp David talks fell apart, and I remember the terrible sadness and disappointment of that. Working on this play, I began to feel that the sadness and hopelessness of that moment really did seem to signal the end of an era and the beginning of another. It was only a few months later that Bush was elected, and only a few months after that, of course, that the 9/11 attacks occurred. The carefree prosperity and peace of the 1990s—the setting of my childhood, essentially—in many ways ended there at Camp David. It was a growing-up moment for all of us, for better or worse.
TS: Is this story about a man who does forget? SL: I would say, actually, it’s a story about a man who can’t forget—if anything, he’s someone who can’t stop remembering. He wants to forget, because he wants to be rid of the burden of history, because it’s so painful to him. He’s paralyzed by it. It’s a naïve fantasy, to believe that you can snap your fingers and simply wish away the traumas of the past, but I think it’s understandable and very human. Michael’s thesis that you can take the traumatic parts of your history and just forget them is a deeply destructive idea; but it’s also very provocative to me, because it points to a pervasive fantasy in our society today that, if we just ignore the painful parts of our history or paper them over somehow, then we don’t have to deal with the consequences.
4 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY
TS: What kind of research did you have to do in order to write this play? SL: I ended up doing quite a bit of research in the writing of the play. Michael, the main character, is a Jewish Studies professor who has written a controversial book about American Jews, the Holocaust, and Zionism, and so I looked a lot at how issues around Israel and Jewish identity are playing out on college campuses, and also the role these issues have played in larger
arguments about academic freedom. There are a number of very high-profile cases from the last decade or so, involving people like Steven Salaita, who lost his position at the University of Illinois after making some particularly unsavory comments about Israel on Twitter. I also looked a lot at Norman Finkelstein, probably one of the most controversial and polarizing figures in this debate. His writings on Israel have been incredibly incendiary—at times purposefully so, it seems— and he’s really one of the poster children for the intense politicization of the entire Israel conversation that has happened in academia. I also did some reading in the field of Memory Studies, which is still a relatively new area of scholarship, where people are looking at the ways in which cultures and societies choose to remember and memorialize their histories, and the way such collective memories are inevitably intertwined with deeper political forces.
TS: How did you find the connection between the character of Lou, Michael’s father, and Dachau? SL: One of the more troubling things that has happened, I fear, as the Holocaust recedes further into the past, is that we have gradually begun to lose a real, visceral sense of the absolute horror of what happened. We’ve seen so many films and read so many books that it begins to feel almost familiar, like any other event in history, a sequence of dates and a series of statistics. Lou, as a veteran who was actually there for the liberation of Dachau, can provide us—I hope—some sense of what it might have been like to experience a death camp before knowing exactly what it was. Before it had been classified and understood and put into context, the way it is today, seventy years later. I think it is essential that we never lose, at a very basic level, our shock at what happened, at the fact that human beings did that to other human beings on an industrial scale. My grandfather was also a soldier in World War
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