Role:            Witness
Where:         New Mercury Theater and A Theater Under the Influence
Playwright:    Peter Weiss

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(The Investigation was a wonderful play that we produced. It's a three and a half hour play about Nazi war crimes trials.  It was taken from transcripts from a 1965 trial in Frankfurt.  And it's just transcripts - and then Peter Weiss, who specializes in this type of documentary-styleapproach to theater, edited it down into what he thought was a manageable piece of five hours, which we then edited down to three and a half.  But it's basically just witnesses standing up and telling their sides of the story, both the guards and the prisoners. Guards above, prisoners below and they just stand up and talk.  That's it - that's how dramatic it is. (clip) And we interspersed it with a really intricate sound design.  Computer sound design was just becoming affordable and we would lower the lights in between chapters and take audiences on an aural journey through concentration camps and make them feel like they were walking through the concentration camps or having to work in the ovens, what it would be like to shovel that, just subtle ways to make you feel like you were even ripping the teeth out of the corpses.  And not explaining that to them, but just (alarmed) "what was that sound?", you know.  And it was a big hit! And everybody all around town was saying, "I can't believe you're doing that, everybody wants to do that play and nobody has the balls.  And we did it!  I mean, it wasn't a monster hit, but it sold well enough to pay for itself. JM.com 2007