Broken Glass

"November 1938. Herschel Grynspan assassinated the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris. In Germany during the weeks that followed, the events of Kristallnacht unfolded. The world heard and remained silent. In reaction to the violent events on the other side of the ocean, Sylvia, a Brooklyn Jewish housewife, is stricken with terror. The news leaves her bedridden. Her husband Philip, an executive with a New York mortgage company, calls Dr. Harry Hyman to her bedside. Hyman suspects that the illness is not only caused by empathy for those suffering under the Nazis, but involves her marital relations as well. To the husband's dismay, the doctor becomes increasingly attracted to the patient and attentive to her emotional needs. Meanwhile, Philip discovers that his Judaism is a barrier to his advancement and that he will never become an integral part of the business world. The problems both from without and within bring about his collapse, while Sylvia begins to recover. As in several of his other plays, Arthur Miller employs the condition of society as a reaction-provoking mechanism affecting his characters. Sylvia's paralysis is also a metaphor for society's inaction. The BBC has accumulated experience over many years producing theatrical masterpieces for television, a medium which so polished that it sometimes actually improves upon the theatrical original. Broken Glass, based upon the stage version of the National Theatre, is a case in point. " 96m CAST: Mandy Patinkin, Henry Goodman, Margot Leicester, Elizabeth McGovern, Julia Swift, Ed Bishop . 1997 "My character says this Nazi thing can't possibly last, but he's wrong. But he's right when he says we should believe in people." His voice gets louder, much louder, as he says: "He's no different to me. I still can't believe, to this day, that human beings could have been capable of doing what they did there [in Nazi Germany], in Bosnia, in Rwanda." Then it falls dramatically to barely a whisper. "But it [the Holocaust] is unimaginable."--"Meet a guy called Mandy", Jewish Chronicle, May 17, 1996

"Grim 'Broken Glass' Belongs on Stage, Not on Small Screen", Los Angeles Times, October 1996