When being a good citizen is just wrong

Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol’s “iWitness,” which opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, invokes the past to challenge the present to a higher standard of ethical consciousness.

Set in Hitler’s Germany, the play revolves around Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian farmer imprisoned for refusing to wear the Nazi uniform. Friends and concerned acquaintances have trouble understanding why he won’t at least superficially comply out of good old-fashioned self-interest. But Franz, who’s as unyielding in his position as Antigone was about burying her brother, prefers principled death to unprincipled national duty.

The production, directed by Barry Edelstein, has its virtues. But the work deserves our attention less for its theatrical power than for its moral clarity and passion. For those willing to attend Sobol’s straightforward and not always dramatically compelling lesson, there’s much to be gleaned in the story of an unlikely hero who understood the way good citizenship was fueling the mad machinery of history.

The facts, cribbed from the playbill, are these: Franz Jagerstatter was born out of wedlock in St. Radegund, Austria, in 1907. His natural father, Franz Bachmeier, was killed in World War I. In 1917, his mother married Herr Jagerstatter, who adopted Franz and eventually left him the farm.

After what’s described by several sources as a “wild” youth, Franz settled down to family life, where he became a sexton at his local church. Vehemently opposed to Austria’s unification with Germany in 1938, he was the only person in his town to have voted against it. He vowed he would never serve in the army of the Third Reich, a position that was held not out of pacifism but rather out of disgust with Hitler’s violation of every civilized norm.

Franz was taken into custody in 1943 after rejecting the call for active duty. A few months later he was convicted by a military tribunal, and he was beheaded later that year. He left behind a wife and three children. Three years after his death, his ashes were spread at his home parish, which has since become a place of pilgrimage for those wanting to honor the humble Catholic peasant who became an anti-Nazi martyr.

Sobol, best known for his Holocaust drama “Ghetto,” which had a brief run on Broadway in 1989, picks up the action after Franz’s arrest. The prisoner (Gareth Saxe) is haggard yet serenely occupied with the menial tasks he lovingly performs. Polishing pots so that they shine like mirrors, he possesses an inner sense of freedom that defies the concrete walls surrounding him.

Franz is immune to the arguments that are marshaled against him by those wanting to save his life. Shouldn’t he consider his family? As the Third Reich is nearly finished, why not just go along with things for a little while longer? What about the innocent victims of the Allies’ indiscriminate bombing? Who is going to protect them?

“Only criminals are still walking free in this country,” Franz says in rebuttal. “The honest people are all locked up in jail.”

The play focuses more on the ethics of Franz’s resistance than on the psychological forces motivating him. As a character study, it’s incomplete. For one thing, Sobol underplays Franz’s religious background, turning him more or less into a secular saint. In truth, he was a devout Catholic whose defiance of the state was arrived at through a deeply felt understanding of his faith -- something that his own church, concerned with its survival, rarely lived up to.

A scene in which a clergyman hears Franz’s confession turns into a philosophical discussion of the elusiveness of truth. The priest, who advances a convenient doctrine of relativism, spins an understanding of current events to excuse his inaction. “Germany has moved at long last to retrieve its plundered territories,” he claims, wanting to direct the conversation to the frightening nightly air raids rather than the stench of cremated bodies that hovers over towns throughout the country.

What’s missing in Sobol’s dramatization is an acute sense of religious betrayal. Everything feeds back to Franz’s single-minded rationale for sacrificing his life: He wants to bear witness to everyday Germans’ complicity with a murderous system. But the behavior is too rational -- too intellectual -- to be fully convincing.

Sobol lends his protagonist a New Age spiritual dimension -- a kind of Buddhist tranquillity inspired by the scouring of crockery. He also sketches a romantic back story that involves Franz leaving one histrionically possessive woman for another who shares his beatific equanimity.

But emotionally something is being skirted, which is why the play seemed less an insightful recasting of events than a blunt theatrical force for good.

The monotony of the treatment may explain the impulse behind Edelstein’s video-enhanced staging, which is quite elegantly managed by cinematographer Alice Brooks and projection designer Jan Hartley. Characters such as Franz’s wife and daughter appear simultaneously in person and on film, a swirling reality that captures the tumult both inside and outside of Franz’s mind.

Images of aerial bombardment, trains bound for death camps and Nazi paraphernalia flesh out the horrific historical background. Franz’s ability to make lucid connections -- to understand the broader implications of local reality -- is what distinguishes him from his fellow citizens, and the production’s expansive visual design holds this in stark relief.

Occasionally, the production amps up the theatricality a bit too forcefully, as though trying to compensate for the narrative’s lack of nuanced progression. What’s more, the acting is allowed to grow oddly shrill at times, particular in the supporting roles that are double cast.

When Franz’s buddy Hans (Seamus Dever) enters the cells with screechingly ribald tales from his job as a chauffer, it’s easy to forget that there are SS officers outside the door. And the Nazi tribunal scene plays strangely like an outtake from “Hogan’s Heroes.”

It’s also hard to reconcile the juxtaposition of Franz’s wife, Franca (an otherwise fine Rebecca Lowman), writing a letter on film to her husband in the most exquisite penmanship with the actress onstage shrieking the words as though her dressing gown were on fire.

Saxe has a compelling presence that radiates moral fervor. His portrait is moving in its committed vision, though the play and the production prevent him from burrowing deep under the skin of the man. We understand the meaning of Franz’s actions in the world but not their origins in his psyche.

But perhaps a focus on political imperatives is what our age most requires. Though the darkness of Franz’s time has no real comparison with our own situation, the message of dissent has unavoidable resonance today, as the outbursts of spontaneous applause at Sunday’s reviewed performance suggested.

“Relevance” is an overused word in the critic’s vocabulary, but there were points during the production when it seemed chillingly apt. “iWitness” reminds us that amid political insanity, rejection of the status quo can be the surest sign of mental health.

*

“iWitness”

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: May 21

Price: $42 to $55

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

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