HAUPTMANN
That same process is the driving engine of Hauptmann, John Logan’s powerful historical drama about the crime of the century–the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Did the German-immigrant carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann kidnap the only son of America’s hero Charles Augustus Lindbergh? Or did Hauptmann go to the electric chair the victim of prejudice, hysteria, and poor judgment? We can’t know. But at the end of the evening, after studying Hauptmann’s words and manner for some clue to the truth, we come away with a sense of mysteries that, though they’re all around us, we haven’t sensed before.
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It’s an immensely pure moment of theater, an elegant clinical experiment in the relation of emotion and narrative that proves, as if we needed it proved, that the stories we tell and the deeds we perform are difficult to distinguish, and that the stage has immutable ambiguities.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/David Williams.
