Bernard Beck performing a scene from “Number of People,” which was written by his daughter.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative
Six years ago, the playwright Emilie Beck was home with a colicky baby and a mounting sense of disconnection from the rest of the world when she read about an exchange between President George W. Bush and Bob Woodward, the author and journalist.
“How do you think history will judge your Iraq war?” Mr. Woodward asked Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s 2004 book, “Plan of Attack.” Mr. Bush responded: “History? We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
“That just affected me so much,” said Ms. Beck, an Evanston native who now lives in Los Angeles.
Infuriated by Mr. Bush’s apparent indifference toward history, and feeling compelled to do something to stave off a sense of total helplessness, Ms. Beck turned to writing. The play that emerged is “Number of People,” a one-man show about memory and the Holocaust, which Ms. Beck wrote for her father, Bernard Beck, a longtime Chicago actor.
The play, which Ms. Beck is also directing, will have its world premiere Saturday at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston.
“This story came from the feeling that we as a nation were losing our memory of things that had gone before,” she said, “and we were repeating some really big mistakes.”
And while “Number of People” is notionally about a Holocaust survivor, Ms. Beck said, it is actually painted on a much broader canvas: the challenge of maintaining collective memory and our shared responsibility to keep history alive, even as the participants lose their personal stories to illness and age.
Last Sunday afternoon, Ms. Beck joined her father at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie for a panel discussion about collective memory, Alzheimer’s disease and the Holocaust. Mr. Beck, who is also an associate professor emeritus of sociology at Northwestern University, performed scenes from “Number of People.” He plays Leo Gold, a retired, recently widowed statistician who survived the Holocaust and is now facing the specter of Alzheimer’s disease.
“This is a play about surviving genocide,” Ms. Beck said. “If I’d written it at another time in history, Leo Gold would have been Armenian or Cambodian.”
Mr. Beck’s character is by turns angry, befuddled and wryly funny as he reminisces about his life, his wife and his beloved daughter, his career and his tortured relationship with God — a presence Gold finds disappointing but impossible to dismiss.
These balancing acts — between rationalism and faith, cynicism and joy — shape the play and its central character. In his more lucid moments, Leo Gold is a rational academic who spent his career dissecting the mathematics of genocide, studying the grim numbers of the 20th century’s most heinous atrocities, from Rwanda to Stalin’s purges (hence the play’s title).
The cold remove of statistical analysis, Ms. Beck said, gives the character the ability to examine the worst imaginable horrors — including his own — from a relatively safe distance. His advancing dementia also provides a degree of protection, shielding him from the full force of his most vivid memories.
Ms. Beck does not offer her audience the same reprieve. By writing a one-man play, in which a single character conveys his mounting disorientation directly to the audience, she has eliminated the so-called Fourth Wall, the tacit understanding that the audience and the actors inhabit different worlds, making their experiences comfortably separate. As Gold speaks to the audience, its members become part of his experience, and the intimacy of an individual voice renders Gold’s distress particularly powerful.
There is another reason, Ms. Beck said, that she felt drawn to the single-performer format. “I really wanted to write something for my dad,” she said.
But while there are parallels between Mr. Beck and the character he plays — both are social scientists who share a vocabulary — Ms. Beck said her father was not Leo Gold. “I wrote this piece to his voice,” she said, “but not to his person.”
“Number of People” marks a kind of homecoming for Ms. Beck. She grew up in the theater, first watching her father perform with the Piven Theatre — where he has been a member and a teacher for nearly all of its 35 years — and later took to the stage herself.
“When I told my parents I wanted to be an actor,” she said, “they were totally supportive but told me I should come up with a backup plan, just in case the acting thing didn’t work out.”
Her Plan B? “I told them I was going to be a playwright,” she said. It wasn’t quite what they had in mind, said Mr. Beck, with a smile.
It seems to be working. “Number of People” is an accomplished character study not easily defined by any one idea or thesis. Just as Leo Gold’s thoughts are tangled by his advancing illness, the themes of the play are also interwoven, frequently in unexpected ways. Pull on one thread — like end-of-life regrets — and one is confronted by a handful of Big Issues: religion, guilt, death, memory, spirituality — and the audience is presented with an intensely personal experience.
“Number of People” runs from March 6 to April 11 at the Piven Theatre Workshop, 927 Noyes Street, Evanston, (847) 866-8049. piventheatre.org
