'What If' Story Pushes Young Audiences

It was late on a school night and 14-year-old Australian Jackie French couldn’t translate her German homework.

After shrieking “My life is ruined! I can never go to school again,” her mother called in help from a friend who was fluent in the foreign language—a kind man whom the young Ms. French suspects had been drinking before swinging by.

He hadn’t known he’d be helping a young girl with her schoolwork that night.

Her mother went to bed. The night grew later. And mid-translation, a slice of the story moved him to tell Ms. French a story of his own.

In Adolph Hitler’s Germany during World War II, a boy Ms. French’s same age joined the Nazi Party, following in the footsteps of his parents and his teachers. It was good to be a Nazi. That’s all he knew, and he believed it all: the Holocaust’s duty to rid the human race of anyone who was blind, lame, Jewish, Gypsy or homosexual; of anyone who believed in their religion more than the dictator; and anyone who disagreed with his policies and had the courage to say so.

The young boy worked as a guard in a concentration camp. And when the war was over, he was illegally smuggled out of Germany with his parents to Australia, as were many other Nazi war criminals.

“When you are 14, and the world around you is insane, how do you know what is good and what is evil?” he asked Ms. French. “How do you know?”

It was a question she didn’t know how to answer at the time, Ms. French, now a children’s book author, explained in an email last week. The question is one she has asked herself many times since. It is one she continues to ask readers of her book, “Hitler’s Daughter,” and it is one that Monkey Baa Theatre Company now asks of its child audiences with an adaptation of Ms. French’s novel during its first-ever international tour, which will bring the Australian troupe to the East End on Sunday, March 10, for two performances at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

“They’ve done it,” Ms. French said, “weaving laughter through tragedy, creating so strong a world of make-believe that the audience sits stunned for five seconds before they applaud. Every time I see it I’m in tears. Each time it seems impossible I wrote it.”

While the plot and set of the one-act, 65-minute production may be relatively simple, the themes are not, Monkey Baa co-founder and director Sandie Eldridge explained last week during a telephone interview from Monkey Baa’s performance stop in Tennessee.

It took her team six drafts and 18 months to get the play just right, she said, and they’re still tweaking it from the road.

The story goes as follows. On a rainy morning at a bus stop in Australia, four young friends—Anna, Mark, Ben and Tracey—are passing the time by sharing stories. Anna begins to tell the tale of the Heidi Hitler, the fictional daughter of the most hated man in history, and it gets Mark thinking.

“He starts to question, to ask questions of himself and his parents,” Ms. Eldridge said. “How do you define evil? Are you condemned if you were born to an evil family? Are you condemned to repeat their mistakes? How did Hitler come to power? Why did he do what he did? Could Heidi have stopped him? How do you know the difference between good and evil?

“For people not to question is a danger, I think,” she continued. “Be really mindful and careful of what angry people offer. Anger is a powerful and evil force. And that was one very angry and evil man.”

According to Ms. French, it should be impossible to stage her book. The action jumps between 1940s Nazi Germany and contemporary Australia, she said, not to mention a Bavarian forest and Hitler’s Berlin bunker in between. The trick is clever lighting and staging among the four actors, their director said, as well as their interaction with the dictator himself.

“Hitler is a massive shadow. That’s the way he was depicted during the war. He was a darkness,” Ms. Eldridge said. “We didn’t want someone dressed up as Hitler with a little mustache. That would be silly. Plus, Charlie Chaplin did it so much better.

“He is a big, dark shadow, like the monster who lives under our bed,” she continued. “The monster who lives in the woods. And maybe the monster within us all who we keep squashed.”

For those who aren’t looking, it can also be a monster in disguise. Nearly 30 years after Ms. French’s experience with her German tutor, she remembered his words again during a production of “Cabaret,” which is set during Hitler’s rise to power.

The lights were low and the stage was empty but for a handsome young waiter who sings the beautiful anthem, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Ms. French watched her own 14-year-old son’s face as he became more and more entranced with every word of the song.

“Oh gather together and greet the dawn,” the actor sang, “Tomorrow belongs to me.”

It was only during the final verse that the lights come up and suddenly the waiter lifts his arm in the Nazi salute. The orchestra stands and they, too, are wearing Nazi uniforms.

Her son’s spellbound expression turned to shock.

“He had been identifying with a Nazi song,” Ms. French said. “He said he realized how he so easily may have become a Nazi, if he had been 14 in Hitler’s Germany. How do you know what is good and evil when you are 14, and the world around you is insane?”

Ms. French and Ms. Eldridge said they do not know the answers to these questions, but that isn’t stopping them from asking.

Monkey Baa Theatre Company will stage two performances of “Hitler’s Daughter” on Wednesday, March 13, at 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, as part of its Arts Education Program, a cross-curricular slate of live performances presented during the school day for students in prekindergarten through twelfth grade, who are bused from school districts across Long Island to the PAC. “Hitler’s Daughter” is suitable for students in fifth through twelfth grade. Q&A session will follow. Tickets are $10. For more information, call 288-1500 or visit whbpac.org.