First review: Can Kissin and Hampson act?

by Susan Hall, New York:

Address Unknown, a short 1938 novel by Katherine Kressmann Taylor, has been made into a play by Marianna Arzumanova.  Mounted at Town Hall in New York by the Cherry Orchard Festival, it stars world-renowned pianist Evgeny Kissin as Max and world-renowned opera baritone, Thomas Hampson as Martin. Can these gentlemen act? We’ve seen Hampson as the Don, Germont pere, Dr. Faustus and Roald Amundsen racing to the South Pole. Now he makes his mark as Martin.  Kissen has mixed poetry with piano performance. 

Set in 1932-33 Germany, the work consists largely of correspondence read aloud by Max and Martin, who have been friends since school days.  Gaudeamus igitur, a 13th-century student  song celebrating youth, the pursuit of knowledge, friendship, and the transient beauty of life brackets the soundtrack.  Kissin performs some piano music.

Max, a Jew, and Martin, an Aryan German, became business partners in the sale of paintings. Nazi propaganda may have insisted that Aryan Germans did not buy and sell for profit and loss as Jews did. Yet Max makes money selling art, and so does Martin.

 Max emigrated to America. Martin remained in Munich, at first attracted to Hitler. We are accustomed to works like Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which examine the aversion of gaze from the horrors surrounding us. 

Address Unknown is unusual in its penetration of the gaze of Martin. It follows the arc of fascism. He will write to Max:  “I have never hated the individual Jew. Yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but … you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say that I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.”  Exempting one good Jew is a dangerous feature of anti-Semitism. 

Febrile ideology wrecks the friendship, as Martin moves on from a mild attraction to Hitler, asking “Is he quite sane?”  and replying  “I do not know.” to his adoration of  “the Gentle Leader”, ready to cooperate in cutting out “the cancer” that ails the Fatherland. He then writes:  “The Jewish race is a sore spot in any nation that harbors it.”  Martin’s suffering as the Gestapo turns on him and his mistaken support is particularly moving.

Hampson remarks that he joined a family enterprise. Kissin’s sister-in-law and wife, Marianna and Karina Arzumanova, respectively wrote this work and acted in it. Both men speak of the importance of resting our gaze on fascism today. Musicians like Evgeny Kissin and Thomas Hampson live very much in our world and contribute to it in often surprising ways.  

Susan Hall