Doron Ben-Atar, former Israeli basketball player and longtime teacher at Yale (now chairing the history department at Fordham University), is the man in question (pictured above with his director Jane Tamarkin). His play, his very first, is titled Behave Yourself Quietly. It will have only two performances, both at the Little Theater on Lincoln Street, Saturday, April 28, at 8:30 p.m., and Sunday, April 29, at 2 p.m. Will it be the launch of a new career? Or will it be a meteoric labor of love? The play is in part based on the experiences of Ben-Atar's mother Roma, who survived the holocaust including a year-and-a half at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Independent sat down at a recent rehearsal with Ben-Atar (even slouching, he must sit, in order to be reachable for all interviews) and some of his actors to approach, if not answer, some of these questions:

Independent: What launched the writing of your play?
Ben-Atar: I'm a child of holocaust survivors. Some parents talk to their children about this, some don't. Mine did, and I grew up hearing, among many others, the story of one prisoner at Auschwitz named Mala Zimetbaum. She was a beautiful young woman, and she became a favorite of the commandant of the women's camp, Maria Mandl. Eventually, through her access to SS uniforms and documents, Mala participated in a dramatic escape, one of the very few ever made at Auschwitz, and one very little known. She was away for two weeks before she was re-captured and then publicly and brutally executed before all the women inmates, as an example.
My mother happened to be within a few yards of Mala as she stood on the gallows. Mala wouldn't let the Nazis execute her. Somehow, for the sake of her dignity, who knows, she had obtained a razor blade, and tried to kill herself on the gallows, not allowing the Nazis to do it. My mother saw all this. That's the background to the play. But I haven't answered your question, quite, have I?

Independent: Whew! Thank you. Not quite.
Ben-Atar: In 2004, my mother and I made a visit to the camp. As she walked past the bunk where she slept as a 16-year-old inmate, she paused for a long time near the site of what was the latrine. "This place was like our coffee shop," she said. "Here was the only place where we could laugh and gossip."
And the Nazis had written above the latrine, "Behave yourself quietly." That image stuck with me, and instantly I knew I had to write a play set around this latrine. I didn't know what it would be, but the image didn't leave me. Even though I had never actually written a play in my life, I go to the theater often, and I knew that a play was there. But it was also bigger than me, the subject. This was not like scratching down poetry like a lot of people do. It was difficult even to show first attempts to my wife. So a year goes by before I actually sit down to write in earnest, because I knew, whether I knew what I was doing or not, I absolutely had to write it.

Independent: And did the writing of this obviously difficult material come easily? Were there many drafts, starts and stops?
Ben-Atar: The first draft was a history lesson. What do you expect! I'm a history professor. I knew it wasn't theater, there was so much exposition. Fortunately I know and have been in touch over the years with theater professionals such as Jane Tamarkin, who's a member of Actor's Equity, and has taught at the Long Wharf and Hopkins. "Doron," she said, "people don't talk this way!" I'm not like some authors. I'm a kind of a team player and I want to learn, so I learned and rewrote. I understood that in a play the intellectual content must come through the characters. So I wrote out the fictional biographies of the characters, in prose, so I knew who they were, and then was able to do yet another rewrite. Jane organized a private reading of the text. She and others were moved, and so we got going.

Independent: With material obviously so close to you, did you allow the director and others to make changes?
Ben-Atar; Absolutely. Jane and the actors involved have credentials and are true collaborators. I let them run with it.

Independent: What's an example of some changes they made?
Ben-Atar: In my script there was a traditional Yiddish song, "The Rabbi Told Us To Be Merry," which I had between acts two and three. Jane showed me that what was going on at that point, at that dramatic point in the play, a song didn't belong. It was dramatically untrue to the moment. That's something that's key in a play, and that I'm learning. So she moved the song to the beginning of the play, and it's wonderful there.

Independent: As I understand it, the play has three women inmates, Henia, Guta, and Eva who are the focal point. The play takes place while Mala is away, and these three inmates talk about her incessantly, whether she's collaborated with the Nazis or not. There's a complicated love-hate, admiration and disgust, very complicated morally. And much of this occurs, with considerable humor, around the latrine, the "coffee shop," as your mother said. So tell me about the humor and if you're nervous about its deployment in the drama.
Ben-Atar: Of course, there's humor. Because that's the way it was. Humor humanizes people, and in the concentration camp society there was a great deal of humor of the kind you have in any community. A lot is based on classes and groups among the Jews. Humor of the two Jews who when they get together they have three positions on an issue or set up three different synagogues. Humor was and is a basic human outlet. I use humor to make the painful subject accessible. My mother told me that people joked often, sometimes on purpose in order to retain their humanity. Absolutely no one joked about the genocidal killing, and there's no joking about it in my play. However the characters tease and jab one another, often about the pre-war world. Humor is one important way to show people not as victims. The point is that even under the most severe circumstances imaginable, these are human beings capable of flaws, laughter, irony.

While Ben-Atar was asked to move some heavy props, we brought up the humor and other questions with some of the actors (left to right): Mariah Sage, who plays Henia, the "glue" who holds the camp "sisters" together; Elise Bochinski, who plays Guta, well named, for she's the "good" one in the group; Lauren Jacobson, who plays Eva, the "baby"; and Agatha Kraft, who plays the commandant, Maria Mandl.

A member of Actor's Equity, experienced performer, and acting teacher currently at Quinnipiac University, Sage said, as the others concurred, that she took her cue about the humor from the playwright.

Sage: From the beginning Doron encouraged us not to be precious about the material. I really enjoy working with new playwrights and new material, and as soon as I read this script, I saw three strong, interesting women characters, situations of great moral complexity, and humor, and I wanted to do it. The humor makes the play unique.

Independent: Can you give me an example of some humor your character Henia engages in?
Sage: Well, there's something about Zyklon B [the gas used to murder the prisoners]. At some point, she also says, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Auschwitz, the musical." I'm not Jewish, and I was certainly raised in surroundings where you didn't make jokes about the holocaust.

Independent: Are you worried about audience reaction to such lines? That you'll be misunderstood?

Sage: Yes and no. One of the best things about this experience is that there is a great deal of give and take with the director and Doron. If some lines don't work, if a line we have to deliver somehow is not meeting the need of the character, we've brought that up, and we change them. We've been making changes up until the moment we lock it in for memorization. So we all have a kind of ownership of this material, it's a rare treat to work on, which makes it very moving. As to the humor, in Doron we trust.
Bochinski: It's humbling to be in this play because, after all, it's an impossible task to recreate what it was like. But we've all been reading about the period, including What Time and Sadness Spare, the memoir that Roma wrote with Doron. But I'm not Jewish either, and my role as Guta is also the role of the most religious, the most Orthodox of the friends. This play is really challenging. Doron has non-Jews playing Jewish inmates, and he has Jews playing Marie Mandl and the Nazis. I think he's interested in challenging easy ways to look at fraught moral situations and pre-conceptions.
Jacobson: What was important for me, and I grew up in a perfectly normal ordinary Jewish home where the holocaust knowledge was there but didn't have a specialized place, was when Roma came here. And we gave a run through for her. She liked it, and she told us details, that we could, and have, added to the play.

Independent: Such as?
Bochinski: For example, Roma said, "When we saw white smoke coming out of the crematoria, we were relieved." Why? Because that meant there would be a break of a day or two in the selections. Roma said she felt guilty but relieved at the same time. She said she thought: Will they ever understand what it means to live the way we do....to be spared only because the ovens are burning someone else?"

Ben-Atar's play appears to be an attempt to answer his mother's question. Returned from his chores, he was asked how he feels, on the eve of the production. "Nervous," he said, "Very nervous. But also deeply thrilled that the play is happening and that these wonderful actors and director are doing it."

Tickets for Behave Yourself Quietly are $15, and $10 for students and seniors. All proceeds will provide scholarships for the March of the Living, a program that has sent 20,000 high school students from around the world to Poland. There, teenagers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, walk the two miles from Auschwitz to the actual site of the gas chambers at nearby Birkenau, in commemoration of the Holocaust. For tickets to the performance of the play, call 203-676-6849.

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