"The Soap Myth" is a play about a Holocaust survivor and his crusade to have a say in history. It's capping off a national tour with a performance Monday at the Williamstown Theater Festival in the Berkshires. (Note: this story contains disturbing details about the Holocaust.)
The play revolves around an elderly survivor, portrayed by veteran actor Ed Asner, who insists that an important piece of Holocaust history has been left out of the official record: that the Nazis made soap out of the remains of their victims.
In one scene, he argues with a museum director, played by Tovah Feldshuh, who tells him, “Sometimes what we thought was true, we find is no longer true…. It is a complicated issue.”
To which the man yells, “No! It is not complicated! It is simple!”
Playwright Jeff Cohen said he wanted to raise the question: who has the right to write history?
“Is it the historian who has to get all the facts right?” Cohen said. “Is it the eyewitness to history, or in this case the survivor of the Holocaust, who's the living embodiment of that history, even if his memory or his facts may be a little bit faulty?”
Cohen also wanted to address the psychological effects of trauma and to bring up human rights issues that remain relevant today.
“If we're going to be up in arms and upset about anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial,” he said, “we also have a responsibility to decry prejudice and bigotry in all of its forms against all sorts of people that become marginalized.”
The play's lead, Ed Asner, starred on TV as news editor Lou Grant in the 1970s. Asner has long been known for his outspoken liberal politics. He said that as a Jewish man, he's worried about continued discrimination and anti-semitism.
Asner also described himself as a "9/11 conspirator" — someone who is skeptical of the official story behind the 2001 terrorist attacks. He said those are all reasons he wanted to play the stubborn protagonist of "The Soap Myth."
“I love a man who felt the urge to reach a goal,” Asner said, “and no matter how much humiliation was accorded him, he kept shoveling until he got to the end.”
As for the end of "The Soap Myth," historians have not quite settled the matter of whether the Nazis made soap from humans; consensus seems to be that it happened on a small scale, but not on an industrial level.
And as mentioned in the play, many worry that Holocaust deniers use the soap controversy to cast doubt on the whole atrocity.
Playwright Jeff Cohen said that perhaps most importantly, many Jewish camp survivors believed the rumor was true, and their memories would be triggered for years, whenever they washed with soap.
As the main character explains in "The Soap Myth": "I can't quite imagine what that would be like, to bathe, to bathe with a bar of soap, and to have peace."
"The Soap Myth" will be performed in Williamstown one night, as a staged reading. A videotaped version is expected to air on public television and streaming services in the fall.
