Hitlers Tasters Gratefully Protect Adolph
In July 1944, with the war going badly for Nazi Germany, members of the German resistance attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by placing a bomb in a room where the Fuhrer would be sitting. Unfortunately, someone moved the bomb, letting Hitler survive with singed trousers and a perforated eardrum. Naturally, measures were taken, including the execution of 5,000 Germans.
As we learn from playwright Michelle Knolos Brooks’ Hitlers Tasters now playing at the Rogue Machine Theater, the Nazi honchos formed a crew of food tasters to sample every meal the Fuhrer would eat. Naturally, only the purest Aryan women need apply-ideally, blonde and blue-eyed, but certainly not gypsies or Romanians, and, heaven forbid, not Jews!
The play’s four young women-Ali Axelrad, Olivia Gill, Paige Simunovich, and Caitlin Zambito-do a marvelous job portraying four teenagers giggling and cavorting as teenage girls will do-until it’s time to taste the Fuhrer’s next meal and then wait a dread-filled hour to see if they’ll be poisoned. They’ve been given a great honor to serve the Reich, but as time passes, they wonder how great that honor might be.
As our colleague Ed Rampell points out, the “well-acted, imaginative play, directed by Sarah Norris, is primarily a drama decrying totalitarianism and anti-Semitism.” Afterwards, the three of us each drew parallels to what’s happening now in the MAGA world, where dutiful acolytes fall religiously in line for their version of the Fuhrer, only someday, we imagine, to see how clearly they have been taken, just as the young food tasters come to understand just where they actually stand in the scheme of things.
Playwright Brooks is the wife of novelist Max Brooks, son of comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks, so she comes to her jaundiced view of all things Hitlerian naturally. She has said she was especially drawn to the nexus of dispensable young women, the Jewish Holocaust, and the complicated relationship between women and food.
Especially delightful is the setting of the Matrix Theatre’s upstairs Henry Murray Stage, a small, bare room that fits maybe thirty theatergoers around a table, three chairs, and the three livewire actors right at your feet. It’s another don't-miss night at the theater.
Rogue Machine Theatre presents Hitlers Tasters at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Mondays; 5 p.m. on Saturdays; and 7 p.m. on Sundays, through June 3 at the Henry Murray Stage, upstairs at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue, L.A., California, 90048. For reservations, call ​(855)585-5185 or here. Rogue Machine’s Monsters of American Cinema is being performed through May 19 on the Matrix’s main stage.