Incident at Vichy: A Play

This play by Arthur Miller, one of the foremost American playwrights, tells about men who were snatched off the streets and dragged to a room in Vichy, France, to be interrogated in 1942 to find out if they are Jewish. Only three of the men turn out not to be Jewish, a pompous businessman, a thieving gypsy, and an Austrian prince who was picked up because he had an accent. The prince is very intelligent, strongly anti-Nazi, and wept when his Jewish servants were arrested by the Nazis. There is also a fearful Marxist, a bearded, sick, elderly man who looks Jewish, an actor who had a chance to escape but wanted to stay to act, a waiter, an artist, a psychiatrist who comments on the lives of the others, and a fifteen year old boy. There is a German major among the interrogators who is strongly opposed to what is happening, but who sees no way, at least until the end of the play, how he can oppose the majority. The prisoners learn about the death trains and the murders in furnaces in the concentration camps. Some of them believe it, others say they do not. Yet it is clear that this is only wishful thinking. Miller raises many issues such as the existence of harsh discriminatory practices in every culture that are bad even though not as bad as those of the Nazis. He ends his play by dramatically answering the question, is the prince somehow also to blame for the Nazi acts?

Incident at Vichy, first published in 1964, is one of Miller's lesser known works, but I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I conclude once again, as I did earlier this year after reading Death of a Salesman.... Miller is a genius! The Crucible is another gem that everyone should read! Really, he is fantastically good. Incident at Vichy takes place in 1942, in Nazi-occupied France [Vichy]. The setting is very simple. A detention room, where eight men and a young boy are being held. One by one, they are interrogated in an adjoining room and none of them are sure of the reason for their arrest. In the tense interim, as would be expected, they talk with one another. Some of these men are Jews, and some are not. Soon, the consensus is that Jewishness is indeed the "crime" for which they've been rounded up, and rumors and speculations are exchanged. Those who feel that their interrogation may end with a "pass" allowing them to leave, become optimistic. Those who know that they themselves are Jewish, panic. And the tension in the room mounts. Should they try to escape? Should they behave themselves and hope for release? Surely, surely their worst fears cannot be true? Soon there are only two men left in the room, awaiting judgment. And Miller ends this 70-page nerve-rattler with a wonderful twist. I'll only say that it is amazing how little paper Miller needs to show us the worst and the best of what it means to be a human being. Apparently, the story itself came from a tale that Miller had heard about a Holocaust survivor, told to Miller by his psychiatrist. It was about a Jew who was rescued from the Nazis by a total stranger. Miller speaks of directing a production of Incident at Vichy some 20 years after the end of the war and, to his astonishment, having to explain to the young actors what the SS was! The only other play that had dealt with the topic in the twenty years since the end of the war was The Diary of Anne Frank. Miller said, "There is something wrong when an audience can see a play about the Nazi treatment of a group of Jews hiding in an attic and come away feeling . . . gratification." From the time that he was very young, Miller was aware of being "different" (Jewish) and felt a sort of warning atmosphere from adults. Whatever it was that gave him this feeling of foreboding, he was aware of it hanging over him. He writes at length of his mother's "mysticism" and her fervor extending even to the point of feeling that the dead communicated with her. And in fact, she may have been right. While they were vacationing, and she was in a deep sleep, she suddenly sat up and said, "My mother died." She was right. Her mother had died during that exact hour. Miller said that his experiences with this sensing of lurking danger was something he had learned, but he had not been taught "how to defend against it. The dilemma would last a long time. The ... effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization, unde

For many readers of Arthur Miller, "Incident at Vichy" may seem like a departure from his typical fare. Set in France during 1942, this one act play takes place in a detention room as nine men question their fate. These men and one fourteen-year-old boy were randomly pulled off the street; initially they believe that it is an identity check, to make sure there isn't anyone with false papers, but as they are assembled together, they soon realize there is something more sinister behind their detainment. Thrown together are men from a variety of backgrounds - a painter, an electrician, a buisnessman, an actor, a doctor, a waiter, a Prince, a Gypsy and and old Jew. As they voice their questions and concerns, they soon come to realize that they are there on suspicion of being Jewish. One by one they are called into the interrogation room where they are either given a pass to freedom, or will be taken away to the terrible fates they are just now learning exist. None of these men wants to admit that they are or aren't Jewish which only adds to the tension as they argue and attempt to formulate a futile escape plan. "Incident at Vichy" is a quick read filled with questions that are bigger than the play. Miller throws questions at the audience that do not necessarily have answers. The ending finds only two men left to be interviewed - the Austrian Prince who was disgusted when his countrymen embraced the Nazis, and the doctor who reveals that he is a Jew and in hiding. Their confrontation turns both of their worlds upside down and creates an ending with no resolution.

In this stunning play, set in a holding room in Vichy, France, in 1942, Arthur Miller introduces nine men who have been picked up on suspicion that they are Jews or Jewish sympathizers. As they are called, one by one, to be interrogated by Nazi officials before being released or put on the thirty-car freight train waiting at the station, they reveal their thinking, their rationalizations for having been picked up, and their belief that this is all a big mistake. A German major involved in the interrogations also begins to question his own role, reminding his colleague, a professor in charge of carrying out Nazi racial policies, that he is a "line officer," not trained for his role. Waiting to be questioned are an actor, a waiter, a businessman, a psychoanalyst, a Marxist railroad worker, a gypsy, an ancient Hasid, a fourteen-year-old boy, and an Austrian prince. As they talk and begin to share bits of information, Miller examines the tendency of ordinary men, who are often victims, to become immobilized when faced with "an atrocity...that is inconceivable," to refuse to believe that such behavior can possibly happen in a civilized world. At the same time, he also examines those others, the Nazis and their collaborators in France, who serve an ideology, not mankind, those who subordinate themselves so completely to an abstract concept that they believe "there are no persons anymore." As the truth about the waiting train and its destination slowly emerges, the sense of dread becomes palpable. The psychoanalyst tries to make his fellow captives understand that it is their belief that the world is essentially rational that is their main problem, and his conversations with the prince, von Berg, are pivotal to the action. Von Berg, a Christian who left his property and thousand-year-old heritage to escape to France, does not understand that he himself is complicit in the rise of the Nazis for not taking action when he had the chance. Beautifully paced, the play is an unusually sophisticated treatment of this subject. Miller does not see events purely in black and white, showing instead that everyone creates his own reality to keep from accepting the unthinkable. Written in 1964, while Miller was representing the New York Herald Tribune at the Frankfurt war crimes trials of officials from Auschwitz/Birkenau, this play is Miller's creative reaction to the atrocities he has heard first-hand--and one of his most powerful plays. Mary Whipple

Incident at Vichy is set in a detention center in Vichy, France. Nine men and a boy have been taken into custody for reasons unknown to them. One by one, they are taken into the office for interrogation. Some leave the office, some do not. The dialogue that between the men grows more intense each time another man leaves the stage. During the Nazi occupation, each for the men was apprehended for looking Jewish. They bear the burden of proof for proving themselves to be gentiles. The main twist comes when Leduc, a psychiatrist, states that "each man has his Jew, ... even the Jews have their Jews to vilify and destroy." This diatribe causes the former Austrian prince Von Berg to surrender his freedom pass to Leduc, allowing him to escape certain death. Von Berg's guilt comes from silently allowing Jews to be cast out of Austria by his cousin Barron Kessler. I find myself to be very appreciative of plays that only use one set. While I found the ending be somewhat of a letdown by Arthur Miller standards, it is a solid work. By combining facts with an intense storyline, a great peace of drama is created. Although I imagine all the discussion of circumcision and male genitals leaves the play unpopular in many circles, I enjoyed it.