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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Breathtaking Mix of Drama and History,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima (Paperback)
Davis' play kept me up well into the night. It is an incredibly learned work--one that paints credible and haunting and damning portraits of the actors involved in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (including President Harry Truman himself). These portraits expose many of the myths, abstractions, and self-serving explanations that have been used to justify America's development of the Bomb and its use, and force us to ask decisive ethical questions about both. The answers to which Davis' play leads us are unsettling, since we may, indeed, now have to memorialize a Holocaust of our own doing. Just as haunting are the voices and images that emerge in the play's depiction of the effects of the bomb as it was experienced by those on the ground. This play forces us to think in human terms about the victims and survivors of Hiroshima, and in so doing, stands as a first step in our attempt to bear witness to past.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Psychoanalysis of History and Culture,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima (Paperback)
The Holocaust Memorial psychoanalyzes the mind of the individual who dropped the bomb and in so doing indicts the culture that produced and continues to sustain him. Davis' drama exposes the core disorder of the American psyche: the wedding of sexuality and death rendered in a succession of violently acute images progressing from the orgiastic and orgasmic explosion of the bomb to the new hell on earth inhabited by the blackened skulls of victims unable to howl upon meeting death. In Tibbets, Davis portrays a man in denial of his dead affect, a man so married to military duty that he can only become aroused by ravaging the world with the bomb. In the Historian, Tibbets' Grand Inquisitor, Davis offers an existential alternative, a man who has been visited by sexual cruelty but refuses to be hollowed out by cutting through psychic defense mechanisms like Tibbet's and America's historical justifications for the bomb and instead preserving the image, of the bomb, of sexual violence, as that which must be neither denied nor repeated. In the drama of their "debate," Davis compels us, the audience, to choose between two paths--the first, the rage for rhetorical order that quiets our fears and covers over our voids by afflicting exponentially unto others what was done unto us; the second, the reversal of such processes of repression-cum-cruelty engaged by bearing witness to and working through the traumatic events in history and in our sexual lives.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Revolutionary Play,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima (Paperback)
This is a play that challenges the bounds of the theater and shatters all our usual ways of understanding history. Through a focus on the individual who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Davis captures the collective mentality that precipitated that event. In doing so, he forces readers to come to grips with our own willingness to be complicit with the worst atrocities of history. Furthermore, the play utilizes drama to enhance the audience's sense of involvement. The play assaults the audience and offers it no respite. One finishes reading with a feeling of being utterly changed.
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