Buchenwald
by Cristina A. Bejan
Buchenwald explores man’s hunger for power and the fight for something greater than the individual. Set in 1946, the show discloses the continued use of Nazi concentration camps as Soviet extermination camps for the Germans. Imprisoned by the Soviets, Nazi SS Colonel Max Richter reaches out to save the future of his young Soviet guard, Sasha Novsky. Buchenwald was inspired by playwright Cristina A. Bejan’s visit to the concentration camp in 2001 when she was a college student studying abroad in Germany. When she toured the camp, she saw the single prison cell “chalk chamber,” learned of the post-WWII Soviet use of the Nazi camps, and was shocked to learn that many Weimar residents lived in denial of the mass murder in their backyard. This new knowledge haunted her and one night back at Northwestern University Richter and Novsky’s story seized her, and the script for Buchenwald was born. Her senior year of college she produced and directed the play as a joint project within the university’s German and Theatre Departments. Fascism and Russian aggression are again at the forefront on the world stage. This play is a reminder of what is ultimately at risk for us all.
- Cast Size: 3M
- Running Time: Under an Hour
- Royalty Rate: $40 per performance
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About the Playwright
Cristina A. Bejan, PhD, is a multi-lingual Romanian-American theatre artist, historian, and poet living in Denver, Colorado. A playwright since age 14, she attended Northwestern University planning to become a Shakespearean actor. She got derailed by the library, which won her a Rhodes scholarship to study at the University of Oxford and a Fulbright to study at the University of Bucharest. While living in Romania, Bejan became involved in the local arts scene which inspired her to start the arts platform: Bucharest Inside the Beltway (BiB). The author of two award-winning books (history and poetry), Bejan worked at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and was a contributor for their “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol 3.” She has written 19 plays and her work has been produced in four countries. Her collaboration with Denver’s James Brunt, The Scholarship, appeared at the Baron’s Court Theatre in London as a staged reading, after an online production by Theatre29 Denver and BiB. Her most successful play, Districtland, sold-out DC’s Capital Fringe Festival and was bought for TV development, and her favorite play, Colombo Calling – a play from Sri Lanka, had a staged reading at the Kennedy Center. The most unusual thing about her as a playwright is that she was approached by the World Bank to write plays for development when she lived in Vanuatu (South Pacific). You can learn more about her creative work at cristinaabejan.com.
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