Theater: Playing a Prick
The idea is obscene and absurd: Somewhere on Long Island, meandering up and down the aisles of some chain store or schlepping through some cookie-cutter strip mall, you might be standing beside a relative of Adolf Hitler-near one or more of the grandchildren of Alois, the infamous Nazi dictator's half-brother. Mark Kassen's Little Willy at the Ohio Theatre is an elliptical, equally absurd look at Alois' son, William Patrick Hitler, that traces his thoroughly improbable journey from Ireland to Germany to Sunnyside, Queens-and then, at last, to a tentative peace and obscurity on Long Island, where he died in 1987 under a new name, one his descendants apparently use today.
Given his odd subject matter, maybe it isn't so odd that the flow of the play-which stars the author and is staged with sullen gloom and eerie shadows by John Gould Rubin-is confusing and nonlinear. Trouble is, Kassen relies too heavily on his audience having implacable patience and infinite good will, on the idea that he can simply take the facts of William Patrick Hitler's life, mix in hints of fantasy and fiction, and blend them into a seamless goulash of time and space, that no one will furrow a brow about or ask, quietly in their minds, a question: Is this all true?
For we do question what we see: The scenes, oft-repeated, in which Adolf Hitler's nephew begs President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a shot at citizenship and a chance to join the military; other scenes, also oft-repeated, in which Hitler's nephew vainly ekes out a living as a Volkswagen salesman in his uncle's increasingly ghoulish Nazi Germany, where he trades on his name to bed as many women (all played to sultry perfection by Roxanna Hope) as he can find.
W.P. Hitler's lack of success at nearly everything he did in life-including sex-was tenuous at best: A 1939 article he managed to publish in Look magazine, "Why I Hate My Uncle," was arguably his biggest claim to fame. Hence the play's title, an emasculating phallic pun bestowed upon him in a scene in which a haughty Frenchwoman is woefully unsatisfied by his pathetic, paltry thrusting.
It's only at the end of the hour-long piece, after a series of fascinating projections explain what really happened to William Patrick Hitler, that Little Willy finally seems fully believable, a finely wrought cautionary tale of a man who thought he was smartly leveraging his famous name only to learn, as the world did, it was one of the most infamous names in the history of humanity. There is a touching sensitivity and, more important, a heartbreaking humanity to Kassen's performance that makes it easy to forgive the actor's thick but fleeting Irish brogue.
If the play is really composed of a theme and its variations-a scene in Nazi Germany, a scene about sex, a scene in America, over and over and over-Kassen and Rubin do manage to convey a sense of the miasma that was William Patrick Hitler's life. No wonder, as the ending projections suggest, that his three sons have vowed never to marry or have children, thus ending the Hitler line forever (be it true or not). The only Hitler line might instead be at the local Blockbuster, where one might be renting Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or better yet, To Hell and Back. From the title alone, the Hitler clan can surely relate.
Through April 30. Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster St. (betw. Broome & Grand Sts.), 212-966-4844; 8, $15.