In May 2020, the playwright Bess Wohl rented a house in Bellport, Long Island, a bayside village an hour or two from Manhattan. This was during the early months of the pandemic, when Wohl found herself running an impromptu summer camp for her three young children. With what little downtime she had, she began to Google the history of the area, becoming curious about a nearby town called Yaphank.
In the 1930s, Yaphank hosted a summer camp for German-American youth who dressed in brown shirts and jackboots. They marched along Adolf Hitler Street and Goebbels Street, greeting one another with cries of “Heil Hitler”. Flowerbeds were planted in the shape of swastikas.
Camp Siegfried closed its doors 80 years ago. But last summer, as Donald Trump’s re-election campaign intensified, the mid-30s didn’t feel so far away. “That really scared me,” Wohl says on an August afternoon. “Like, this is still completely here – the feelings that led to that camp are still present.”
Wohl, a playwright of mischief and empathy, knew that this had the makings of a drama. Opening this month at the Old Vic in London, Camp Siegfried is a boy-meets-girl-meets-fascist-indoctrination two-hander, directed by Katy Rudd and starring Patsy Ferran and Luke Thallon. Like all of Wohl’s plays, it’s a particular mix of tragedy and comedy, a drama about people in crisis who can’t entirely articulate just what the emergency is.
“That’s also just how I experience life. I think everyone is sort of in crisis all the time, actually,” Wohl says.
She grew up in Brooklyn, where she went to the theatre often. In elementary school, her grandmother took her to see Sandy Duncan in Peter Pan and when Duncan flew above the audience, it called out to something inside Wohl. “I want to do this,” she remembers thinking. And she did, in her mirror, singing along to Les Mis, or at her family’s progressive church, starring in the choir’s musicals. Later, at Harvard, she would act in play after play, when she maybe should have been studying for her English degree.
She graduated at 20 and enrolled at the Yale School of Art, studying photography. But that felt wrong almost immediately. So she dropped out, re-enrolling two years later in the acting track at the Yale School of Drama. The drama school hosts a student-run cabaret space and during her second year, Wohl wrote a piece for her classmates to perform there, Cats Talk Back, a clawed comedy that imagines a Q&A following a performance of the musical Cats. It wasn’t flying over an audience, not exactly, but it offered a kind of freedom, the idea that she could make the work rather than waiting for the work to come to her.
She gave acting a try, anyway, driving the highways of Los Angeles, auditioning for sitcom roles she didn’t even want. The auditions rarely went well. Mostly because while Wohl is pretty and lithe, she has always vibrated at a stranger, more intense frequency – a character actor trapped in the body of an ingenue. If she were to become a playwright, she realised, she wouldn’t have to panic at every pimple. She wouldn’t have to wear high heels or tight jeans or stuff cutlets into her bra.
She sold a few network pilots. The pilots never got made, but they allowed her to spend most of the rest of the year writing plays. She had a few productions, then a few more, racking up critics’ picks and award nominations.
Wohl’s Grand Horizons, a rare comedy by a woman to make it on to Broadway, received a Tony nomination for best play. But Wohl doesn’t think that she writes comedies. If her plays are funny (and they are extremely funny), that isn’t exactly intentional. “I’m trying not to be funny, ever,” she says. “I’m trying to write about the most painful thing I can.”
Her plays begin as a why, or a what-if, or as what Wohl calls a “weird little prank,” usually a structural constraint that works against the tidiness of stage naturalism. “All of my plays are kind of fighting with how naturalistic they want to be,” she says. A few of these pranks: Could she write a play (Small Mouth Sounds) in which almost no one spoke? Could she write a play (Continuity) that presented version after version of the same scene? Could she write a play (Make Believe) with children in the first act and adult versions of those children in the second?
Sometimes she will find herself sitting in the audience of a show just before it opens, thinking: “Wow, this prank really went far. We’re really doing this.”
A romcom about two teenagers in the midst of Nazi indoctrination may feel like another prank. But if the play begins as a meet-cute it manoeuvres toward something darker, a drama about seduction – sexual, ideological, theatrical. Because the story of Yaphank seduced Wohl. And going to a play, giving yourself over to the lights and the costumes and the talk, is a kind of seduction, too.
Wohl wants Camp Siegfried to seduce its audiences, but she also hopes that it will wake them up to a history they might instead ignore. “It’s like, how do we keep this conversation alive?” she says. “How do we stay vigilant? It feels important not to just sweep it under the rug of history and not acknowledge the painful, dark moments in our past. Because that’s when I get worried about the future.”
Camp Siegfried is at the Old Vic, London, until 30 October.
