WHAT DOES THE FACE OF EVIL LOOK LIKE?

Evil has worn a face ever since the world's religions have pictured it for us. In some cases it's been a bull, a goat, a scorpion and a vulture. The three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have agreed upon a serpent. There must be something to their choice, for to this day snakes are almost universally looked upon with palpable revulsion. However, there's more than one way to stare one down...!

Four years ago Mel Brooks did it not with loathing but with laughter, featuring two cast members from here in Chicago. I spent opening night with them at the Cadillac Palace where they jauntily chose the most evil face in our times -- Adolf Hitler -- to laugh at for two scandalously uproarious acts titled The Producers. Now the Broadway hit has just opened in the heartland of the fatherland itself -- Berlin. What's more, the show is playing for the next two months in the Admiralspalast where Hitler himself attended plays in between conquering countries.

This is of course more than a theatrical issue for my friends. It's a moral issue. Can a nation which has lived for three generations in expressed shame for its Hitlerian evils now shift from shuddering to snickering? According to the critic's early reviews, the answer is yes. Perhaps enough time has passed and enough victims have died to clear the way for a treatment that a few years ago would have itself been called evil.

We can analyze this a dozen different ways. From the argument we have matured enough to turn fear into ridicule, to the claim we have coarsened enough to take evil too lightly. Either way, there are larger questions hidden in here. What do we mean by evil? Is evil something to fight or to accommodate? And who decides what's evil in the first place?

To pose the questions is easy; to answer them is complicated. Here's an audience member's guess:

* Evil is more than simply the actions of evil-doers. It is a cosmic force which exists in our midst the same way the force of Love, Goodness, Beauty and Truth exist. Evil is always out there, shrouding itself inside various people at various points in time and place. All part of the inexpressible combat between yin and yang, between our demons and our angels
* In times past, societies have believed evil an enemy so great it called for its death and destruction. Too often in ugly self-righteous forms, yet always rooted in the presumption that what is out of harmony with our cosmos needs to be plucked
* Who, though, is to decide? That's the trillion-dollar question. To illustrate how difficult it is, consider the historical fact that Hitler himself was once hailed as "good" by a majority of the 60 million Germans of the 1930's
The two cast members from that opening night are not in Berlin this week. But if they were, I ask myself would they find their original roles now played by young post-Hitler Germans as funny as they did back here in Chicago? It occurs to me the two of them might already be talking to Mr Brooks about a new study in evil that has also damaged millions of lives. Featuring Wall Street Bankers!

And musically suggesting that there actually is an enduring force of evil in our midst. Only it keeps changing faces, inviting us to keep changing the way we stare it down.


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