The Difference That Day Makes

That Day is a student-written, student-directed play born from the vision of Nina Sawyer '01. She translated and adapted a short story about a little boy's experience in Nazi-occupied Germany--which constitutes the first part of the play--and wrote the second half herself. That Day tackles the experience of two parallel families, one in France and the other in Germany, who for some unclear reason are suffering from World War II.

This play bathes in ambiguity--and almost drowns in it. One does not know why the families are suffering, why the French family is forced to leave its hometown and abandon their child. Who are these families? Are they Jewish? Are they resistance fighters? The director leaves important concrete details out of the picture on purpose--to assert the universality of the harm that World War II caused? Everybody already knows the war is bad, so what does this play do that's new? Part of the reason for the ambiguity, at least in the first part, is that the play is from the little boy's point of view. We hear his thoughts over a loudspeaker. And we know just as little about what's going on as he does. The danger is that the audience might forever be lost in his nave, childlike world and only realize that he is sad because his parents left him--missing the larger point.

Although this play puts a rather original twist on the experience of the war, it lacks much in its execution. The blocking is overdone-- there is a constant cycle of walking back and forth and sitting down and getting up that detracts from the action of the play. There are several scenes in which nothing really happens except that the characters circle around the stage and come back to where they started. Lengthy pauses are another shortcoming. There is one point in which some Nazi guards stand in front of a bench for about five minutes without a single word, and then one of them remarks that he is tired of waiting--how about the audience? Another downfall lies in the excessive hugging in this play. The relationships within the French family, for example, are completely demonstrated by the hugging that occurs every time the husband comes home (after a cycle of walking around the stage, of course). There is not enough dialogue, and no noticeable momentum builds up. The acting itself is pretty dry--the families do not come across as real. Maybe the problem lies as much with the script, which often tends toward the exaggerated, melodramatic, and clichd. The parents are too sentimental to their children--a little wholesome scolding in place of the constant hugging and kissing would make the families more convincing.

Despite the fact that this hour-long play could easily be condensed into 15 minutes, it does have some redeeming qualities. The props and especially the costumes are delightful. One real window hangs in the middle of the stage. This window is used by both families, and links them in a way. Both families have only a glass window to protect them from the forces of the war; both mothers wave goodbye to their sons from this window. It stands as a symbol of the common human suffering behind the war.

And the play does pick up in the end, in the sense that it goes from basically no plot to more plot. Some interesting issues of child-parent relations are raised when the German family's child turns his own parents in to the Nazis. This action raises a lot of questions about the son's motivations for revealing that his parents are in league against the Nazis.

This play should be applauded as a spirited attempt to make a new point about the war and its effect on certain families, but it is not as piercing as Life is Beautiful; the director-writer's vision falls apart at the seams because of the slow pace, unnecessary pauses, unrealistic acting and especially because the ambiguity is in danger of simply confusing the viewer instead of emphasizing the universality of the sadness and suffering that the war caused.