Gulag Drama

This afternoon I attended a reading of a play by Bill Rumbler. It was set mostly in a Siberian gulag prison in 1938.

The central character is a woman convicted of political crimes in one of the big Stalinist purges. She keeps telling herself, and anyone who will listen, that the charges against her were all a big mistake, and that soon she will be freed.

Then she hears a rumor that women who give birth in the gulag will be pardoned. From that rumor springs the central action of the play, which shows how people form relationships to fight dehumanization.

It was interesting seeing a play about the Soviets now, when the Soviet threat is no more. It felt a lot like seeing a play about the Nazis - like that play about Heidegger's love affair with Hannah Arendt. You see the sheer human suffering and self-delusion involved in living under totalitarianism.

I feel no regret
That the red sun has set
On the Soviet threat.