The Holocaust Memorial: A Play About Hiroshima

The play becomes the psychological battle between these two men as the latter forces Tibbets to relive his life, while Tibbets does all in his power to turn the tables and "get the goods" on his antagonist. Who is "the Historian"? What are his motives, his needs his vulnerabilities? These questions, which are Tibbets’, are also those of the audience. Thus, each provocation by the Historian calls forth a vigorous reaction from Tibbets. Out of this conflict come -- as if summoned -- the primary architects behind the decision to drop the Bomb (Truman, Stimson, Oppenheimer, Groves, and Byrnes). As they strut their hour, the play becomes a psychodrama of progressive descent into the "American psyche" and the collective disorder that achieved its sublime "object" in the Bomb. Its culmination is a dream-state -- the representation of the Unconscious mind of Paul Tibbets at the orgasmic moment when he felt the return of the shock wave from a bomb named "Little Boy," which he dropped from a plane he named after his mother, Enola Gay, on what he termed "the virgin territory of Hiroshima."

Act II

Act II begins at ground-zero. The cast members who formed the queue at the bookstore have become the Hibakusha, the people of Hiroshima, given over to an experience that no one on earth had undergone before -- the split-second disappearance of an entire City and then the nightmare of living on in a landscape become "death’s dream kingdom." Through a play of voices and gestures, a collective agent emerges as the drama represents the experience of the Hibakusha from day one through the onslaught of another horror they were also the first human beings to experience -- the rapid and inexplicable emergence of radiation disease, all information about which was withheld by the Americans from the Japanese until the Occupation. These scenes are juxtaposed with the Historian’s effort to bring his internal conflicts to a head by forcing Tibbets to explore with him the source of their shared disorder: the familial origins of the cruelty that, for him, defines the American psyche. The drama of sufferance enacted by those who die -- often with great tragic dignity but without knowing why they "hemorrhage from within" -- and the effort to get at its "cause" in the avidities of the human psyche are thereby brought together in a way that deprives the audience of all comforts and illusions.

In a final twist, the play comes full circle and finds us back at the beginning -- Tibbets again seated, signing autographs for the queue. This time, however, the Historian enters and shoots the general. He then holds the gun to his own head before dropping both arms in recognition of defeat and despair. At that moment, Tibbets "rises from the dead" and resumes his action for a queue that the audience realizes will go on forever and of which the audience has become a part. No curtain.