LOS ANGELES—The most mesmerizing performance of the year so far is currently overwhelming audiences at the Mark Taper Forum.  It’s that of Gareth Saxe, playing real-life hero Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian conscientious objector during World War II.   The play is Joshua Sobol’s searing drama iWitness, which he translated from the original Hebrew, and which director Barry Edelstein has adapted to include historical references that are as applicable today as they were then.

Saxe remains onstage for nearly two hours (with no intermission) earnestly defending his beliefs against a torrent of compelling arguments to recant.  Entombed by the Nazis in a dingy prison cell, he has been convicted of desertion because he refuses to serve in the Wehrmacht, Germany’s combined armed forces.  He has only to sign a document disavowing his beliefs and don a military uniform and he will be released to serve in the war. The alternative is death by guillotine.

 

The play is set in 1943 Berlin, when many in the Third Reich were beginning to envision defeat.  But for Jagerstatter it is not fear of combat, or even death, that motivates him.  It is a refusal to take part in the destruction of Europe.  “I will not be complicit,” he insists.

 

But yet there is the heart-breaking yearning for his wife and small daughter, (played by Rebecca Lowman and Christina Burdett, respectively) who visit him in his imagination and long for his return.  And a rather surrealist visit from two childhood friends, Martin and Hans (James Joseph O’Neil and Seamus Dever), who are both serving in the Army.  Hans’ military duty consists of chauffeuring a Colonel around, sleeping with the Colonel’s wife, and stockpiling materials to sell on the black market.  He assures Franz that he can find him a similar assignment.  “You will never have to go to the front,” he says. “You will never have to kill anyone.”

 

Martin, however, has become an anti-aircraft gunner and an ardent Nazi, and speaks of the “threat facing the Fatherland” and the Allied bombings of innocent women, children, and old people.

 

“Whoever starts a war breaks the rules,” Franz says, and the parallel with the current war in Iraq is quite clear.  But instead of the “Axis of Evil” he invokes the “Abyss of Anarchy” in which everyone has the “right to spin his own story from reality.”   

 

There is also reference to the Catholic Church’s implicit acquiescence in the Nazi’s war in the character of Father Jochmann, the prison priest, played by Michael Rudko.  He claims not to know of the fate of Europe’s Jews.  “I am not an eyewitness,” he says.  But Franz insists that everyone in Germany knows and that it will be known throughout the world when the war ends.  “If you want to bear witness,” the priest pleads, “you must stay alive.”

 

Even the jail guard, played by J.B. Blanc, seeks to convince Franz to change his mind.  Speaking of the guillotine he notes that “once that blade starts to move, nothing on earth can stop it.”  But Franz replies “Make peace with death and nothing can frighten you.”

 

iWitness is brilliantly written, adroitly directed, and masterfully acted.  A uniformly excellent cast brings this intense production to a boil, aided by a most serviceable set design by Neil Patel, formidable sound design by Jon Gottlieb, and most especially projection design and cinematography by Jan Hartley and Alice Brooks.  The drab gray wall of the prison cell serves as a screen for projected black and white images of Allied planes and bombs as well as figures from the mind and memory of the martyred hero.

 
 “I’ve just met a saint,” the prison priest says as he leaves Franz’ cell.  To which the audience can only respond, “Amen.”

 

 iWitness will continue at the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center in Los Angeles through May 21.