Love between any two people is as mysterious as it gets, but the romance between philosopher Martin Heidegger and political theorist Hannah Arendt considerably raised the improbability ante.
This production of Mario Diament’s play, spanning a quarter-century of their entanglement, delivers on the inexplicable but falls short in the realms of the plausible or satisfying.
The opening scene is a dramatic train wreck. College student Arendt (Carolyn Jenson) arrives at the office of famed thinker Heidegger (Dan Hopman). more than twice Arendt’s age, the married Heidegger begins by praising a paper on Plato his student has written. Before long, though, he’s professing the degree of his ardor for her, while she follows suit.
It’s not the morality of the situation that troubles, it is an utter lack of believability in either performance. Hopman displays none of the ostensible charisma that would draw Hannah in, and Jenson is left delivering flat readings of Diament’s frequently jaw-dropping, awful dialogue (“the Weimar Republic fills me with apprehension,” Arendt declares, hardly the sort of pronouncement that typically leads to uninhibited passion).
Matters (gratefully) improve from here, with the play tracking the pair’s clandestine mutual obsession amid the march of German history. Arendt, a Jew, is eventually forced to flee in fear for her life. Heidegger, in accepting a major university post, slides into a squishy allegiance with the Nazi powers. while he
eventually leaves the job, his positive statements about Hitler and the Nazis continue to haunt him throughout his life.
Hopman takes on an extremely thankless job, essentially mouthing Heidegger’s obliviousness about what he’s gotten into (at one point exhorting Arendt to let go of the “petty trivialities” of her Jewishness), then his lukewarm excuses after history proves him incontrovertibly wrong. still, in his performance Heidegger is nothing but an object of weakness, a thing upon which events play. If nothing else, we need at least a depiction of his power as a thinker that never comes across.
The final scene is the best, taking place in 1950 with Heidegger enlisting Arendt to try to clear his name, then come meet his wife (to whom he has spilled the beans about their affair).
Heidegger comes across as offensively self-serving, which may or may not have been the case. but Jenson begins to deliver a convincing sense of Arendt’s own inner contradictions, including the fact that her love for Heidegger could not be dampened by his failings, his wrong-headedness or the horrors of history.
Her final monologue hits the truest, most profound notes of the evening. Unfortunately, it’s not worth sitting through the rest to get there.
What: “A Report on the Banality of Love”
When: Through March 28
Where: Hillcrest Center Theater, 1978 Ford Parkway, St. Paul
Tickets: $24-$18
Information: 651-647-4315 or mnjewishtheatre.org
Capsule: one of history’s inexplicable loves gains some illumination, though not enough.
Theater review: Inexplainable love remains unexplained in ‘A Report on the Banality of Love’
