Johnny Berchtold, left, and Lily McInerny in Camp Siegfried. Photo: Emilio MadridIn Bess Wohl’s new play, Camp Siegfried, a boy and girl on the cusp of becoming a man and woman meet in the summer of 1938. She, as the female character is simply called, is sixteen going on seventeen, and He is seventeen going on eighteen—just like The Sound of Music‘s Liesl von Trapp and Rolf, the local dreamboat who falls for her but ends up falling harder for Hitler.
That reference isn’t arbitrary: He and She may not live in post-Weimar Austria, but at Siegfried—one of several camps actually operated in this country between 1936 and 1941, in this case on New York’s Long Island, by a pro-Nazi organization called the German-American Bund, with the goal of indoctrinating youth—similar forces are bearing down on them, even as both grapple with the more natural questions and urges that accompany the transition to adulthood.
The combination proves toxic, with the teenagers’ outsize passions making them even more vulnerable to the allure of extremist ideology. She arrives at Siegfried for the first time after a traumatic experience, a high-strung girl who is, She admits, “scared of everything basically all the time.” He appears more confident at first, boasting that his dad is a high-ranking Bund member, though He also identifies as the “runt” among his brothers.
And while He initially espouses the party line more enthusiastically, arguing She should take more pride in her heritage, that too changes, as the already damaged girl comes to embrace the camp’s diet of harrowing physical demands and relentless propaganda with an almost masochistic zeal. By the time this one-act play has run its course, the emotional and sexual dynamics between the two have shifted in ways that confuse, thrill and infuriate them, ultimately having violent consequences.
The message is clear—almost too much so. Near the end, She makes contact with an outsider and relays his insights: “He said that anybody can fall into anything really,” She tells He, neatly summing up the lesson of the previous ninety minutes. “Anyone can be seduced…Never underestimate your infinite capacity for delusion.”
Though Wohl has demonstrated a flair for combining mordant wit with forthright compassion in plays as diverse as Small Mouth Sounds and her Broadway bow, Grand Horizons, there is little humor or warmth palpable here. The bleakness is purposeful, of course, and is managed with predictable savvy by director David Cromer, a master of intimacy, and a pair of appealing, intuitive young actors.
As He, Johnny Berchtold brings precocious sensitivity to a case study in that condition known in modern parlance as toxic masculinity, revealing how insecurity can be exploited and even a fundamentally gentle soul subverted under social pressure. Lily McInerny’s She is ultimately even more disturbing as she mutates from a nervous wallflower into “a Valkyrie princess,” as an awestruck He describes her—demonstrating, in the process, that toxicity isn’t exclusive to one gender.
Brett J. Banakis’s bucolic set—all grass, trees and wood—underlines the sense of nature being corrupted, of something fresh being spoiled here. That ugliness can fester in beautiful settings may not be an original observation, but it is a timely one, and Wohl’s play, if not her most affecting, provides a sobering reminder.
Camp Siegfried opened November 15, 2022, at Second Stage and runs through December 4. Tickets and information: 2st.com
