Arthur Schnitzler was a storyteller--Viennese, Jewish, a physician, novelist, and playwright--who wrote about the moral dissolution and sexual depravity of Europe before the first World War. ("Eyes Wide Shut" was adapted from one of his works.) By the time he died, in 1931, Schnitzler himself had been denounced by Germany's Nationial Socialists as an example of "decadent Jewish art" and cast into the dustbin of literary history.
Professor Bernhardi, first performed in Vienna in 1912, is Schnitzler's only dramatic work that's not, explicitly, about sex, but it was banned anyway because it was seen as anti-Catholic: a doctor forbids a priest from visiting a dying, delusional patient (who believes she's being rescued by her lover) to perform last rites. Both doctor and patient happen to be Jewish.
The Obie Award-winning playwright Amlin Gray, right, unravelled the play's convoluted narrative and talky structure; his updated adaptation, titled "The Greater Good," is set in 1932 Vienna. (Even so, it's still talky and convoluted.) Under the auspices of the Endangered Species Project it was given a spirited reading by a dozen actors this week; it was clear from the outset that Prof. Bernhardi didn't stand a chance against his hypocritical and opportunistic accusers.
You can read every contemporary social outrage into Schnitzler's message, and you get back to the same old truths: it isn't just Jewish lives and black lives that matter, all lives matter. Science provides no protection against willful ignorance; religion no defense against irrational prejudice.
Europe's Jews were easy targets for Germany's and Austria's extreme nationalists because they looked and acted "different." Many would assimilate and blend in; others would argue that the answer was a Jewish state. Neither would happen in time to save the subject of Schnitzler's play or Gray's drama. As one character puts it, "The human intellect wanders in darkness."
Endangered Species Project: Monthly readings of older plays at ACT Theater.
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