“After Auschwitz, it is barbaric to write poetry” wrote German thinker Theodore Adorno. Adorno is addressing the difficulty if not impossibility of creating beauty from the experience of human suffering without insulting or trivializing the horror. Martin Sherman’s “Bent” (on until Nov. 15 at Espace Theater in Montreal, produced by the Altera Vitae theater company) takes up this challenge by focusing on the plight of queer men in Germany under the rise of National Socialism. It is a difficult play that raises questions about memory, suffering, representation and the power of love.
In a nutshell, Bent tells the story of a gay man who endures the rise of Nazism first in flight from the SS with his lover, then, after capture, as an inmate at the Dachau concentration camp. In both contexts, it is the power of love – in this story, queer love – that provides a humanizing force in the face of relentless and murderous brutality and an urgent need for survival.
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