CROOKED CROSS Begins Performances Tomorrow at the Mint Theater

Mint Theater Company will present the American premiere of Crooked Cross. Set in a small village in the Bavarian Alps, Sally Carson’s “Crooked Cross” presents an eerily familiar portrait of the rise of fascism," by Rebecca Mead. This Off-Broadway engagement begins Saturday September 20th at Theatre Row for a limited run through November 1st. Opening Night is set for Thursday October 9th. 

"With the book’s rediscovery, Carson is restored to her place among other Anglosphere authors who observed from up close the dawning of the Nazi era, including Kay Boyle, the American writer whose novel Death of a Man, published in 1936, was set in the Tyrolian Alps, across the Austrian border from Carson’s fictional Kranach, and Christopher Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, depicted the decadent life of the metropolis immediately before Hitler’s ascent," writes Mead. "Contemporary reviewers praised Crooked Cross for its poignant love story, and for its ripped-from-the-headlines contemporaneity: one newspaper said that the book was “more truthful than telegraphed reports; it is fairer than propaganda. And it is infinitely more interesting than either.” The novel was adapted into a successful play, and Carson followed it with two sequels, before her death from cancer, in 1941, by which time the prescience of her fiction had become appallingly evident." 

The play, written by Carson and based on her 1934 novel Crooked Cross — the title refers to the Swastika — premiered in the U.K. at the Birmingham Rep in 1935 and was staged in London in 1937 but never seen again. The Times called the play “enthralling” while commending the young author’s “temperate wisdom… Through it all she never preaches, or loses touch, through hate or prejudice, with the human beings she represents.”  

Crooked Cross is Sally Carson’s dramatization of her novel of the same name. The novel was published in 1934. Persephone Books reissued the long out-of-print novel this April.  Carson writes with great compassion, sympathy and vision: “Through it all she never preaches, or loses touch, through hate or prejudice, with the human beings she represents,”  Laura Freeman, writing about the novel’s re-issue in The Times said. "It was written as a warning then and its message sounds just as urgently today as we worry about lost boys, strong men and old hatreds. If you have ever wondered how a nation was hooked and hypnotised by the Nazi party, Crooked Cross explains it with awful force."

Crooked Cross draws us into the story of the Klugers, facing the economic and political challenges of life in a quaint village in the Bavarian mountainside between Christmas 1932 and June 1933. At the heart of the play is a family torn apart by conflicting loyalties. Lexa Kluger is engaged to Moritz Weissmann, a Jewish doctor. Lexa’s brothers, Helmy and Erich, are becoming increasingly involved with the Nazi party. We see the rise of fascism, but we also see the yearning for belonging that drives these young men into the darkness. 

At a post-show talk in 1935, Carson spoke about the generation coming of age in Germany after the Great War: “The German youth had been brought up to believe that their country was ‘beaten’ and ‘second-class.’ They developed a feeling of inferiority… Then along came Hitler who said, ‘You are not second rate and you are not going to be.’ This creed inspired the young people… Whether he will continue to bamboozle the people much longer, no one knows.” 

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