The play Ganesh and the Third Reich is sort of like the Wizard of Oz, with Ganesh (instead of Dorothy) seeking an audience with Hitler (instead of the Wizard) to reclaim the swastika (instead of trying to get back home). It’s a lot of things: a play within a play, a tonal essay, and an exploration of cultural iconography. The Public Theater, where the Back to Back Theatre company is performing it, issued a warning to ticket-buyers that the production "contains coarse language, adult themes and a portrayal of Lord Ganesh which some may find troubling.“ What was far more troubling to me than seeing the Hindu god portrayed by a dour, overweight Australian actor, as well as all the swastikas, was something else. Three of the five actors in the ensemble are mentally disabled, which shocked me.
Why was it shocking? These three actors are, simply, playing characters who are mentally disabled. Mental disability isn’t one of the play’s themes; it’s not explored structurally or poetically here, to discover how a differently-minded individual uses language and imagines the world, as it has been in some of Robert Wilson’s collaborations with autistic poet Christopher Knowles. The play contains dramatic tonal shifts, with lyrical scenes (there’s a train travel sequence that might be the most captivating thing I’ve ever seen on a stage) undercut by brutally naturalistic ones (like a a scrum of the five actors rolling around the bare stage). In one memorable passage, a displaced, mentally disabled, German Jew running from the Nazis remembers that he had been different since he was a child, saying "I heard stories differently." What unsettled me about watching the mentally disabled actors was the fear that they were, somehow, making themselves especially vulnerable to the audience without entirely understanding these vulnerabilities. Yet they performed with such clarity and alacrity that this might not be true.