Remembering Playing for Time

By Diana Kincannon

“Playing for Time” is a 1980 CBS television film, written by Arthur Miller and based on acclaimed musician Fania Fénelon’s autobiography The Musicians of Auschwitz. The work was based on Fénelon’s experience as a female prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she and a group of classical musicians were spared in return for performing music for their captors. The film was later adapted as a play by Miller.

It premiered as a stage work at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, directed by Joy Zinoman and performed in the fall of 1985. I played the role of Elzvieta, a non-Jew who was sent to Auschwitz for aiding Jews .

I closed my eyes in the darkness as I did each night, waiting with the others in the close, bare space for the music to begin. It would start, the eerie electronic sounds, distant, dissonant, drawn out, punctuated with sharp noises, muffled cries, violent metallic shrieks.

I would let the images come, will them to come, will myself back through the years. I opened myself to the music, let it carry me into madness.

I imagine the earth spin- ning under me. I’m lifted high into cold, black air. I speed across seething ocean, past hilled and forested foreign lands. I imagine my soldier father, young and strong, lounging on unknown ground, his uniform tousled, his rifle close beside him — a snapshot of him somewhere in Europe, a gray forest showing in the distance. I imagine other scenes, a flashing collage of them, creating a reality for the precise moment when I am catapulted into the box car inside the barren, barricaded, wired walls of Auschwitz, the camp where the trains bring unsuspecting thousands, day after day, month after month.

The music climaxes in a screeching, screaming military violence. I step once again onto the small stage as Elzvieta, a woman in a circumstance beyond imagining, beyond re-creation. I am playing in an orchestra, playing for families as they’re separated from each other, husbands from wives, children from parents, playing as they’re moved forward to the showers.

Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time came to the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC as a screenplay, not fully adapted for live theatre. The director — strong, abusive, temperamental, defensive—all these, and brilliant, too, took the episodic, fragmented work and kneaded us into the captive, shaven-headed women who made up the perverse orchestra of Auschwitz. Almost every day for six weeks we entered the purging environment of rehearsal, in our spare time practicing the difficult, unfamiliar Von Suppe orchestral excerpts that the actual orchestra was forced to play for the sadistic Nazi high command of the camp. Illness swept through the cast. Still we came. Vanities disappeared and we grew quiet, inwardlooking. Each night before the performance, we read stories of survivors to each other, words we wanted to turn away from, yet embraced to internalize, to use. For me, the death of a friend became an experience to translate; each night I wept over the body of our murdered conductor. We knew early on the dramatic challenges, the musical challenges, the points the critics would attack. We resented the director, yet longed to please her. We resisted the dark, demented world of this drama, yet threw ourselves into it like martyrs into the fire. Most nights when we left the theatre, we sought the outdoor restaurant nearby. We ate and laughed in the dim light, the night breeze blowing about us. The release was so sweet, the laughter so eager, the food so satisfying. We knew we would re-enter that other world again, and all too soon.

Alnell Farm 541 +/- acres | $8,000,000

Alnell Farm is home to 541 +/- acres of beautiful rolling hills and pasture located in Flint Hill, Virginia. This scenic property is surrounded by unspoiled countryside and expansive views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, offering a private and quiet escape to enjoy. The farm consists of 7 residences, a 10-stall barn, and 8-acre spring fed pond, all protected by conservation easement. The property also offers a 9-bay machine shed, 3 silos, multiple storage buildings, a machine shed, fenced pastures and 7 paddocks that support the livestock and agricultural uses of the farm. The prime location of this property allows for the luxury of private living in Virginia’s stunning horse country, but also provides the convenience of being under one hour to DC and Dulles International Airport.

When you’re ready to move, call Will. Will Driskill

Licensed in the Commonwealth of Virginia 540-454-7522