As a Jewish Canadian, director Bronwyn Steinberg always felt obligated to understand the Holocaust.
“I had this need to try to look at this atrocious period in history and try to make sense of it,” she said. “I guess you could call it third generation survivor guilt.”
Steinberg’s latest production, the world premiere of fellow Jewish Canadian Darrah Teitel’s Corpus, follows the story of Megan, a young PhD student from Toronto who discovers a mysterious connection between the wife of a Nazi officer and a Polish-Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz in 1944.
According to Steinberg, Megan’s story parallels what many Jewish Canadians feel about the Holocaust.
“It’s looking at this very human impulse to look at things that are horrible. You see this bit of information and you want to understand it, you want to attach motivation and relationship and all these things to it,” Steinberg said.
“It’s totally natural, but it’s also a bit dangerous,” she said.
Steinberg said Corpus reflects the importance of looking back on events like the Holocaust. But she also said she considers the play something of a cautionary tale.
“[Corpus] is really about how we remember dark periods in history and especially how we retell the stories, how we fictionalize them, and how we sometimes even sensationalize them,” she said.
In Corpus, Eric Craig plays Eli Kaplan, a prisoner at Auschwitz who forms part of the Sonderkommando, a work unit of Jewish prisoners forced to help the Nazis dispose of gas chamber victims’ bodies.
Craig said Corpus brings out how difficult it is to reconcile what happened at the Holocaust with our current sense of right and wrong.
“It’s incredible how easy it is to forget that these were people. They’re not just horrifying stories,” Craig said. “It’s so unthinkable, it’s so horrifying, and it’s so easy to dissociate yourself in that way.”
Craig, a University of Windsor graduate originally from Ottawa, said Corpus tests what people think they know about the Holocaust.
“It’s not a gentle show, it’s a show that challenges some of the assumptions we make about horrifying acts and I think it’s a show that in many ways asks some really tough questions,” Craig said.
Steinberg’s production company, Counterpoint Players, is the first to stage a full-scale production of Corpus. However, Steinberg said the play has already garnered critical acclaim and received several stage readings in Canada and the United States.
Staging Corpus will also be a first for Steinberg. Since founding Counterpoint Players five years ago, the play is the first full-blown production she has ever produced and directed solo.
“It’s exciting and terrifying at the same because it’s my first time really being fully responsible financially as well as artistically for everything on this big of a scale,” Steinberg said.
“But I’m super optimistic about it,” she said. “It’s got so much potential.”
Corpus premieres May 1 at Arts Court Theatre and runs until May 10.
