Original Play The East at Dean College, Ponders Women’s Role in Holocaust

The School of the Arts at Dean College will perform The East, beginning Wednesday, October 12, 2016 through Sunday, October 16, 2016.
The East is an original play by Dean faculty members Matt Greene and Craig Handel. With their homeland in conflict, five young women, 19-22 years old, seeking a sense of identity and purpose, answer the call of duty and travel to The East, to provide moral support for German soldiers during WWII. Their story is one of youthful hope and optimism confronting the harsh realities of war.
“We wrote it over the course of the past year, and we’re still working on it,” says Handel, who says the inspiration for the play was a recent book by historian Wendy Lower, called Hitler’s Furies. In it, Lower writes of recently unveiled documents that show women’s roles in the Holocaust.
“It showed all of the ways that an industrialized killing machine needs to be administrated, and the support women were providing,” says Handel. At the time, 1941, he says, German soldiers were involved in groups of killing squads, and many of them suffered intense anguish and guilt. Nazis, he says, “established these things called ‘soldier homes, where these guys could come and experience a little bit of home, and they would bring young ladies to talk with them, dance with them, socialize with them.”
“We have a senior class at Dean that is almost all female, and it’s well-known, well-documented, that there aren’t a lot of great roles for women in theatre,” says Greene. “We wanted do something together, to write a play and give all these really young, wonderful students something juicy to sink their teeth into.” The five women on the journey in The East come from all different walks of life, says Greene, as many college students do. All of them have different perspectives.
“As they become aware of what these guys are doing during the day, they kind of have to deal with the reality of it,” says Handel, who says he has pondered the question of how someone who grows up and learns the moral norms of society becomes able to “flick a switch.”
The play portrays their journey and subsequent ordeal, emphasizing their humanity at odds with the inhuman world of the Nazis.
“An insane ideology has taken over,” says Greene. “We have a mixture of characters, from completely ignorant to the other end of the spectrum, to someone who has a pretty good idea of what’s going on and are all for it.”
“It’s a look at what happens to people when they become involved in a war that uses dehumanization to make it okay to kill your enemy. We want people to, in a way, recognize a part of themselves in these girls and ask themselves, ‘What would I do?’ I believe that all of us have buttons that can be pushed, and unless you’re extremely vigilant, you’re susceptible,” says Handel. “You have to be able to imagine that scenario and have strategies for it. And I think theatre enables us to do that, to look at ourselves from a safe distance and consider the human condition.”
“It’s a very human story,” says Greene. “And it’s about people during a very horrible time and what they do in that situation.”
Professor Matt Greene recently spent six years as a Blue Man in the popular Blue Man Group. He performed more than 1,000 shows, playing in front of millions. Professor Craig Handel is an actor, director, playwright, and combat choreographer who has been working professionally from New York City to Los Angeles since 1978. 
The East will be submitted to the New York Fringe Festival in December. If accepted, the cast and crew could present the play in New York during the 2-week festival in August 2017. 
Tickets to The East, which will run from October 12-17, range from $5-$22 and can be purchased online. To learn more and purchase tickets, visit www.dean.edu/boxoffice.