At Las Vegas Little Theatre's interpretation, I did just that. To concentrate on something more compelling ... like counting the seats. Rarely has a play so stomach-knotting on the page been so yawn-inducing on the stage. Despite a sincere effort by all involved, this is a misfire of disturbing proportions, given the depth of the material squandered.
Martin Sherman's Bent is a powerful, transcendent piece about homosexuals during the Holocaust—not only the horrors suffered (their concentration-camp pink triangles marked them as even more contemptible to the Nazis than the Jews' yellow stars) but also of one man's journey from a casual, noncommittal gay lifestyle to an embrace of his identity, in a literally shocking climactic act, while imprisoned at Dachau. It is both deeply personal and highly political, a plea for tolerance and a proclamation of pride.
As Bent opens, we meet Max (JayC Stoddard, in a silly, matted wig) and Rudy (Rommel Pacson), a gay club dancer, in their tiny apartment in 1943 Berlin. Max is a coke-loving hedonist paying less attention to his country's shifting societal order than to drug-fueled one-nighters. The latest conquest is a studly German soldier—until Nazis burst in and shoot him for performing "unnatural sex." The startling moment is meant to plunge us into the Nazi nightmare, but the soldiers are more Keystone Kops, setting a regrettable tone from which the play occasionally rises, but which it never overcomes.
Max begins to comprehend the looming terror in a way flighty, naive Rudy doesn't. The two escape to the Netherlands border but are captured at a homeless tent camp and put on a train to Dachau. That's when Bent goes for broke.
Onboard, Max meets Horst (Jerome Vitale), a conservative gay prisoner who warns him to stay silent if he wants to survive, as the debasements begin. After Rudy is tortured, his tormentors demand to know if Max is his "friend." Max denies it, then is ordered to finish their job and beat Rudy to death. At Dachau, Max—who strikes a deal with some Nazis to wear a yellow star rather than the lowlier pink triangle—tells Horst how he had to prove to his captors he wasn't gay by having sex with the corpse of a 13-year-old girl they had just murdered. These are obscenities that should rip at your sense of humanity, but director T.J. Larsen and his actors seem too invested in restraint, perhaps fearing that such incendiary material would otherwise ignite into an excruciating experience for the audience, but the result is a dramatic bar set depressingly low for this lightning rod of a play.
In Act II, Sherman crafts the guts of Bent. Against the stark setting of a red-brick prison wall and an electrified barbed-wire fence, Max and Horst are assigned to gather rocks in a pile, transfer them to another pile, then back again, all day, every day, a chore meant to drive them to madness. Forbidden from looking or touching as they lug rocks back and forth, the two argue and challenge each other. Horst chides Max for hiding his homosexuality behind the yellow star, and especially about the love Horst begins to feel for Max, daring the once-oblivious party boy to return the feelings and out his lifestyle to the Nazis and his capacity for love to himself.
In Bent's most talked-about sequence, they simulate lovemaking through aural sex. Backs to each other, they graphically describe intimacies between them, bringing them to orgasm. Performed at a stronger emotional pitch, it's an astonishing act of defiance, consummating the most human exchange in a hell designed to rob them of humanity. But it plays more as a break-time quickie on a phone-sex line. By the time taunting Nazi guards force a cruel, tragic climax, what should feel like a transformative experience—the liberation of love and embrace of one's self amid hatred and murder—instead provides only a momentary jolt that fails to haunt the conscience.
That's a substantial fumble of Bent's considerable power.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt's controversial reference to the Nazis' "banality of evil" may have some contradictory logic, but the banality of drama—particularly, this drama—does not.