“Banality of Evil, as a phrase,” Jesse Freedman the Artistic Director of Meta-Phys Ed. told me on the phone last week, each of us speaking from our respective Brooklyn apartments, “is more popular than its source material. We spoke about his current show at The Brick Theater which opened on Thursday, March 21st. The play, titled The Banality of Evil, first premiered as a workshop at The Tank in 2022. A product of Freedman’s long-term fascination with philosophy, theory, and Jewish thinkers, the play takes on Arendt’s most notorious work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil, as a courtroom detective narrative where three actors play versions of Arendt attempting to make sense of their surroundings. Tapping into what he considers the almost jazz-like quality of Arendt’s train of thought, the work revels in Eichmann‘s controversy when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1963.
In 1963, the high-ranking officer Adolph Eichmann was brought to Jerusalem from Argentina, where he’d been in hiding, and put on trial for his involvement in The Final Solution. However, given that the case was tried in Israel a mere fifteen years after the country’s founding, the trial ended up taking up the significance of the entire Holocaust and the collective suffering forced upon the Jews. The trial, Arendt writes, was not about Eichmann’s actual crimes, but the theoretical notion of justice and the necessity of it being bestowed upon the Jews, as victims. Insofar as the trial elucidated the cause for Eichmann’s involvement, Arendt’s phrase– which as Freedman correctly articulates is a concept understood independently of its material and intellectual source, and is perhaps the only Arendtian turn of phrase most people know– argues that the depths of Eichmann’s malice stem not from a sincere hatred of Jews, but from the unoriginality of following instructions from his superiors. Understandably, this shocked readers. How could a Nazi not be purely evil? Since its publication, Arendt’s essay has eluded readers. It is unclear what should be done with her findings.
In my discussion with Freedman, we covered his history with theater, how he started his own company, his intellectual interest in Judaism and Philosophy, and why Arendt’s essay continues to haunt him. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: How did you become interested in Theater?
Jesse Freedman: I got into theater performing magic as a little kid. I started doing, you know, magic shows, and birthday parties.
EB: Were you trained formally? I ask because I have a friend who was something of a professionally trained magician as a child.
JF: I don’t think that anyone is trained formally now… you can’t join the circus to become a magician, but I was a part of young magician groups and I had teachers who were trained and you learn from books. But you know, from age 5 until 30 I was performing anywhere from as a hobby to semi-professionally slinging magic tricks to kids at FAO Schwarz. Magic has always been a hobby or a job and I still work in the field, and it allowed me to perform and craft my own method of performing from a young age. Being a magician is great because you get to do solo performances– I was like ten to fifteen years old trying to figure out what my performance practice is and what a direct interaction with an audience is. Magic can happen anywhere– on a stage before 2000 people or at a bar, but it ensures an intimate and embodied understanding of how audiences respond to something. I love the fun of toying with an audience, creating an expectation of what will happen, and subverting it– how much you can get away with that before they feel cheated or figuring out how much delight an audience can get out of that dynamic. Eventually, it led me to plays in school and experimental theater.
EB: Are you from New York?
JF: I’m from Connecticut originally, but not far from New York. My whole family is from New York, the five boroughs. My grandmother lived in the city and would take us to see shows– every year we would see a couple of Broadway shows. I particularly remember Cats and Starlight Express.
EB: When you say you were discovering experimental theater, what did that look like? Was that on your own time? Were you reading books?
JF: I think it happened a little bit in dribs and drabs. I went to The New School and that’s kind of when you get thrown into it. Before that, I had a sense that was theater that happened in big buildings that’s traditional– and I noticed the relationship between conventions employed and the musicals I’m doing in high school– and then something that’s a different theatrical tradition, but I don’t know that I learned about that or had the language for that directly. Then, you know, I’m 18 or 19 years old and I’m studying in The Village in 2000. I encountered The Living Theater and the SITI Company and all these companies were explicit about the experimental theatrical tradition they were a part of.
EB: Were you a theater major?
JF: I focused on theater, but it was a very well-rounded Liberal Arts education. In addition to studying theater, I studied race studies, cultural studies, educational studies, and gender studies. Cultural studies was of particular importance.
EB: How did you come to be involved/help start in Meta-Phys Ed?
JF: Maybe in 2011 or 2012, Bronwen [Mullin], the co-founder of the company, found me to direct this opera she had written based on a chapter of Talmudic text around dreams called Chalom: A Dream Opera. She was looking around to see who was involved in the Jewish theater scene and someone told her about me and she tracked me down. We became friends pretty quickly and worked on a few small projects together, including her artist residency at the Drisha Institute, and then we founded this company together to put on this opera.
We formed the company just as both of us were starting graduate school– Bronwen was starting rabbinical school and I was completing an MFA in Theater at Sarah Lawrence and we put on Chalom: A Dream Opera the summer after our first years at graduate school. Given my interest in religious studies and Bronwen’s plans for rabbinical school, there was always a religious bent to our work. Eventually, we figured out after putting on the opera while in school, that we both needed to focus on school full-time. My MFA was two years, but Bronwen’s schooling was six years. I needed a vehicle to move forward with my work and that’s how I ended up taking over the company. Bronwen sort of handed it over to me.
EB: How would you define the mission of Meta-Phys Ed and how might it compare to other experimental downtown theater companies?
JF: I think theater companies should be like bands. Missions are organizational necessities but not artistic ones. If you met John Lennon at a party and asked him what The Beatles’ mission is and how their latest album reflected that, I’m not sure he’d understand the question. This is to say that an important part of a theater company is that the work they do is personal. I believe in people making work that is culturally personal because it’s likely to resonate with people, really anyone, who has strong ties to their own culture– history, and community– and I’d like to think that’s what our role is in the theater world and community. We, Meta-Phys Ed, do culturally personal work that’s easy to share.
EB: You stated that you want to make work that’s “Easy to share.” What does that mean for you?
JF: Everybody is situated in their own complex and personal identities, histories, and communities and I think that the way that you make room for other people’s complex identities is by situating yourself in your own. It ends up being an invitation for others to bring more of themselves to the room. For instance, we did a show about The Talmud, which is highly inaccessible. Still, our show based on it was extremely accessible while simultaneously being challenging and rigorous. There was a clear invitation to bring people in and have them engage with the material. The invitation was broad and wide.
EB: Can you speak a bit more about how you incorporate religion into your work? Was this an interest of yours before meeting Bronwen?
JF: Yes! Prior to meeting Bronwen, I was on my own spiritual journey. I was religious and observant even though I didn’t grow up that way, but I became observant for about ten or twelve years. I’m no longer an observant Jew, though I’m religious in a sense.
Talking about religion and spirituality is fraught and has always been fraught, so doing it in a way that’s not dogmatic and not about selling you anything but is merely a starting place to talk about ideas ends up being quite meaningful for people. There’s also a way in which someone could look at the ideas of our work– exploring the relationship between religion, spirituality, culture, technology, and politics– and think “You’re Marxists! You’re exploring the relationship between structure and superstructure.” They wouldn’t be wrong! I like to think that in watching the work you can feel the presence of community, history, and identity. On any given night, you might be waiting to enter the theater and hear a bunch of people speaking Yiddish and it might not be because it’s a Yiddish show, it could be Hamlet!
When the company started, it was a very different company– Bronwen was writing and composing pieces that I directed. We were both very interested in the tension between the spiritual and the material and that was also very much so about the mind and the body– we were doing all this intellectual textual exegesis but what about dancing? We were curious if there were other epistemologies for understanding texts. Is the process of making art or learning text only an intellectual task or can it be an embodied task as well? That is also very much what Meta-Phys Ed. Ed. is about: “Don’t think, Feel! It’s like a finger pointing away towards the moon– don’t concentrate on t the finger or you’ll miss all the heavenly glory”.
EB: Wow!
JF: It’s from a Bruce Lee film! [Laughs] But I also want to say that I’m well aware that individuals who have grown up in religious communities need space and distance to be able to engage with these ideas. If people need years before coming to see my shows, I understand.
EB: Given your piece on Walter Benjamin’s Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, are you particularly drawn towards the work of Philosophers and Jewish Philosophers?
JF: I am particularly drawn to Jewish philosophers but not exclusively– I get inspiration from a lot of different sources. I’m on a Jewish Frankfurt School kick currently, but if we’d had this conversation a few years ago you might have said, “You get a lot of inspiration from classical theatrical texts and pop culture.” I really like theory. I’m not an academic. I’m a theater artist. I try to read rigorously, and I’m a terrible writer [laughs], but I like to think and talk with people. There is something about that particular school of Philosophy and theory that I feel attracted to, also coming out of The New School, I felt a connection to that history and intellectual tradition. I feel like I’m a part of an intellectual history that’s a part of me and I find the writing incredibly exciting. I wouldn’t stage all of Benjamin’s writings, but there was inherent theatricality in the Work of Art Essay. Also, his [Walter Benjamin’s] life story and his way of thinking are so identifiable. Reading him I think, “Yeah I’d like to have dinner with that guy.” But the pandemic totally derailed this project. Instead of being about the here and now, it ended up being about the projected image on a screen.
EB: Benjamin’s work also seems fitting given that he’s writing when the Nazis were coming into power.
JF: Yes– it’s a theory of revolutionary art. Benjamin was prognosticating about fascism and Arendt was reflecting.
EB: When did you first encounter Arendt and do you have a particular interest in her or were you drawn towards Eichmann in Jerusalem?
JF: I first encountered Arendt in college really in the context of performance studies. She loves theater! She writes that theater is the place where theory happens and calls it the political art form par excellence and uses theater as a metaphor in her work, a lot. So that’s how I came to learn about Arendt. I liked her and she’s been on my mind ever since.
I heard about the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil because just like the work of art essay, everybody has heard of it– it’s a part of the cultural consciousness. Some people have read and studied the whole thing, and more people have picked it up and discarded it halfway through. Banality of Evil, as a phrase, is more popular than the source material. It ended up being a pandemic read for me. I sat down, unemployed, and started to read it and was struck by a couple of things: the theatrical metaphor of the trial and the courtroom and immediately asked myself how I could make something of that. And also, the work is about reckoning with a period of fascism. In my mind, I was thinking about what do we do with all the complicity of the Trump Era and all the people of that administration. And while I was reading this book, people were joining ICE and ICE was knocking on doors in my neighborhood. But it was also about so much more than I could wrap my mind around and that’s what I look for in a project– if I know exactly what it’s about, it isn’t worth my time. If I feel like I need another two years to figure out what the project is about, then it’s a project I want to pursue.
When I started to look into it, I realized that the work came from a series of articles in The New Yorker and that was fascinating because TNR is such an institution, especially in New York City and these articles were written for popular audiences and there was such a controversy surrounding them. So it was very much about The New Yorker and the way the story was told to the United States. Also, it was a Holocaust story that took place in the 1960s in Jerusalem and that was so complex and I wanted to know more about it.
EB: Why this piece now? What about the now led you to bring this piece back, after its premier in 2022? What is the impact of The War on Gaza while mounting this work?
JF: The work started as a workshop in 2022. We spent six weeks studying the material, and when we completed that it was clear there was so much more we wanted to explore and audience members expressed that to us and we wanted so we committed to continuing to develop it. When I went into this project, it was about fascism, it wasn’t about antisemitism or genocide or Zionism, but it became about that and it’s not like those subjects weren’t there, it just wasn’t part of the political stew that we were cooking in then. So you have to change your framework, but surprisingly, we haven’t changed anything about the show, but the piece hasn’t changed because I don’t believe in chasing artistic headlines– theater takes too long to make so if you make a piece to stay relevant because it’s in the news, you’re going to be too late, and also why would you do that anyway it’s exploitative. Make the things you’re interested in and believe in. I just don’t think that theater as an art form corresponds to the newspaper in terms of immediacy. I think theater corresponds to much larger reflections of history.
Tony Kushner wrote the play Homebody/Kabul (2002), and when I first encountered it as a sophomore in college, I didn’t really understand what was happening in Afghanistan. But Tony Kushner, because he’s a thoughtful person with a strong moral compass had written a play about Afghanistan in its post-colonial context, and it was in tech when its topic became a buzzword in media, and I was grateful for it because it was discourse I was chasing, but that wasn’t Tony Kushner chasing headlines, it was him studying history, and patterns that are much great than what’s in the news.
If your work is about anything, the context is always changing– you can’t control what history does and what the world is about, so you just have to have in mind that the piece could be about whatever it’s about when we do it. This is to say I’m very comfortable saying I don’t totally know what the implications of doing this play are now, but I’m aware that the conversation and the scope are much broader and include the topics of genocide, antisemitism, and zionist, but Arendt is already having a complex conversation about those things and I like that it’s a bit asynchronous. She’s talking about it in a way that’s very particular about Arendt in her historical moment and it’s going to be asynchronous with the way we talk about it right now and I think that’s a good thing. I think Arendt would be happy about it too.
EB: What can the audience expect from this experience?
JF: There’re three actors, all detectives, and they’re all Arendt in some sense because if I had to justify it dramaturgically Arendt had the idea of the “2 in 1.” Where do we go when we think? What is thinking? So that’s how I think about it– these detectives are building an argument, or a case of “why?” together. Eichmann isn’t represented on stage as a character– there is no mimesis of Eichmann. It’s a crime scene reaction because she was at the trial so now she’s in the process of writing the articles about it. She directly answers and states the layout of the scene– “Eichmann sat here. The judge sat there!” And then following a chronology you can be brought to a lot of different places: Argentina and his memoirs in Vienna in 1938.
EB” The idea of a “show trial on trial.” Is this you adding another meta layer or is this what Arendt commenting on?
JF: I knew we were working with the idea of courtroom drama, investigation, and detectives and wanted to think about how this could work in a sort of conspiratorial direction. But also, Arendt is very critical of the way that the Eichmann trial proceeded and says that the trial was a failure of justice and collapsed. She is concerned with Eichmann, but she’s concerned with an abstract notion of “justice” and the “trial” as objects and the orchestration of this trial by the Ben Guiron administration to attempt to show all the Jews of the world that Israel was the only safe place for Jews to be– that was another purpose of the trial, that Israel had its place for a specific reason and Arendt is critical of that. She believes that if Eichmann was to be put on trial, then the trial– like a play– needs to be about committed acts and evidence that proves they did something and this trial wasn’t about what Eichmann did but about the Jews and the world and what they suffered. The trial brought no new evidence, so that’s what I mean by a “show trial on trial.” She’s really investigating and interrogating the trial before she investigates Eichmann.
EB: I’ll share a personal anecdote, I went to Kenyon College in Ohio and while there were a fair number of Jews there, there were also students who had never met Jews before college. Given this, I encountered some casual antisemitism from time to time. One particular instance was a non-Jewish classmate taking delight in the articulation of Jewish culpability in Eichmann. This is an actual conflict for Arendt in the essay– the reality of individuals doing whatever necessary to survive. Is this a topic that you deal with in the show?
JF: We tell those stories because it’s part of her train of thought, part of the story of how the Holocaust happened, and a big part of the banality of evil argument. I don’t think she’s trying to blame anybody, but trying to describe how political administrations collaborate. We don’t omit that part of the argument, and we try to deal with this reality by putting the play very rigorously in the context of her arguments. The first way Arendt responds to her critics is she says “Well, you clearly haven’t read my book…” If anything has changed between now and when she wrote this in 1963, when the material was scandalous, is that time has passed and people are cooler and can hear these points. The controversy of that statement, that we are of course all complicit in being part of a political machine, has worned down. Let’s not have illusions.
The Banality Evil will be at The Brick from March 21 to April 6th. Purchase tickets here.
To read more about Meta-Phys Ed. and their upcoming performances, check out their website here.
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