Games, Henry Naylor’s play about two German athletes in the 1930s, brings to life the challenges and triumphs of Helene Mayer and Gretel Bergmann, star Jewish fencer and high jumper, respectively, in Nazi Germany. The play follows the women’s development from gifted child athletes through the period when Nazism clouds their futures. Both come from Jewish backgrounds, but Mayer has a non-Jewish mother. Their differing experiences after Hitler’s election and Nazism’s subsequent anti-Jewish restrictions is the meat of Naylor’s two-character play.
Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, both women are sent abroad—Bergmann (Renita Lewis) to England and Mayer (Lindsay Ryan) to the U.S.—to study and grow as athletes. Both return to Germany to train for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The drama reveals the ultimate outcomes of that training, but much of it centers on the enormous differences in the women’s personalities, attitudes towards the Nazis’ policies, and their own identities.
Bergmann, who is ultimately rejected for the Olympics, is more conflicted. Her feelings of betrayal are at odds with the sentiments of Mayer, whose identity is so intertwined with fencing that she lacks basic empathy with her co-religionists and their lot. The dissonance between the athletes’ attitudes and modus operandi drives the women apart.
At the outset, the two women speak but are seen only as shadows projected from behind opaque red screens. This is one of the rare instances where dialogue and movement fluctuates back and forth between Bergmann and Mayer. Overall, there is little interaction between them. Early in the play, an awestruck Bergmann, representing her school, is tasked with presenting an award to Mayer, who is already a renowned fencer. After the Nuremberg Laws are passed, and both women are training at an elite facility, they meet again. This time, Bergmann is critical of Mayer, for whom the overall predicament of German Jews, including German-Jewish athletes, is of little concern. Mayer’s responds to Bergmann with a line that she repeats frequently—“I am a fencer.” Mayer’s identity is inextricably intertwined with her sport, and less so with her Jewishness.
Mayer’s and Bergmann’s monologues reveal how the women respond, individually, to the changing environment for German Jews and its impact on their sports. They reflect on their transitions to life abroad, where they are given opportunities in higher education and athletics unavailable to them in Germany. Despite this, the women’s nostalgia for home, family, and (more so for Mayer) competing in one’s homeland is evident. Eventually, the Nazis do invite Mayer back to compete. Mayer considers this:
And for one moment, for one moment, I can feel I am holding history in my hands.
If I turn down this invitation. The Americans will surely not come.
The Games will fall apart. Hitler will be humiliated.
The future is in my hands.
I who have lived to keep Politics out of Sport. Will destroy everything that I am.
Ryan is thoroughly convincing, in movements, words, and expressions, as the fencing-obsessed Mayer. Her preparation for lunges and thrusts is ballet-like in its grace and symmetry. Lewis is equally skillful in her movements, and overall, creates a credible Bergmann, although with a notch less focus than Ryan.
In spite of limited playhouse space (the actors use the aisles) and low budget (one symbolic costume for each actor), director Darren Lee Cole has produced a show that is likely to rivet the viewer.
“Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, both women are sent abroad—Bergmann (Renita Lewis) to England and Mayer (Lindsay Ryan) to the U.S.—to study and grow as athletes. Both return to Germany to train for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.”
Still, there lurks a deeper question. Why did Naylor, an acclaimed playwright, choose to focus on two Jewish female athletes who coveted gold medals in Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Berlin “show” Olympics? Is there something in Mayer’s and Bergmann’s odysseys that speaks to us today? Although the astute Naylor has carefully explicated a “Jewish question” that complicates sports, and life, for Mayer and Bergmann, he has avoided pointing to what it means for them. Over millennia, nationalists and authoritarian regimes have ruthlessly persecuted ethnic minorities, without much public outcry, yet, when it has been expedient for those regimes to boost their respectability in the international community, they give one or two token outcasts a chance to shine. Undoubtedly, though, Games is not just the story of two exceptional women who have the rug pulled out from under them because of their religious affiliations.
The full range of Naylor’s messages in Games is not obvious. One possible interpretation is the way in which repressive governments use, abuse, and then cast aside, when they are no longer needed, those who have helped them shine; there may be multiple, equally valid interpretations, but Games is surely thought-provoking.
Henry Naylor’s Games plays at the Soho Playhouse (15 Vandam St.) through Nov. 24. Evening performance performances are Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m.; matinees are Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. For more information, call the box office at (212) 691-1555 or visit sohoplayhouse.com.
