E-Mail This Article to a Friend Remembering Auschwitz A Conspiracy to open old wounds BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Hearing Steven Bogart talk about plays and films that have made lasting impressions on him, it becomes easy to understand the creative forces that make him tick. Each artist he pegs as influential tackles one of two themes: memory and silence. From Samuel Beckett’s plays to Anne Bogart’s essays and directorial work to Fellini’s 8 1/2, the treatment of these issues has been like a melody piped to his conscience during the six years he has "lived with" his play, Conspiracy of Memory. Now, following development in Boston Theatre Works’ annual festival of new works, BTW Unbound, the piece will receive its professional premiere courtesy of that company next week. The play tells the story of a septuagenarian Holocaust survivor whose battle with Alzheimer’s brings long-repressed memories from Auschwitz surging to the surface. The emergence of his trauma threatens to shatter the infrastructure of his family.

Conspiracy is the first of Bogart’s plays to be produced. The writer has plunged himself headlong into the production process, a commitment critical to him because of the subject matter. "As people who experienced it are dying of old age, the Holocaust is really becoming part of history. I feel so responsible for a play about the Holocaust," he said tremulously on a recent Monday. Bogart had come from his Maynard home to meet in a Harvard Square café on his way to rehearsals in Watertown. It’s a rare afternoon that he has a chunk of free time, but schools are closed for MLK Day. Any other day at this hour, he’d be at Lexington High School, where he teaches drama and runs an after-school performance group.

As he speaks, Bogart’s voice quiets and he apologizes. He proceeds to tell of a survivor who recently stopped by a rehearsal to share his experience of Auschwitz. The visit, organized to give the cast an opportunity to ask questions, raised doubts in this conscientious writer grappling with a delicate subject so real to so many: hearing firsthand testimony of unspeakable horror spurred Bogart to confess that "my play feels inadequate."

"Anybody writing about [the Holocaust] has a responsibility to represent it authentically," he said. That need for authenticity explains why Bogart transformed what was originally a screenplay for a "weird conspiracy thriller" to a script for the stage, which BTW submitted to a new-play competition run by the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. (Conspiracy advanced to the final round, but the competition was phased out that year.) Among Bogart’s reasons for changing the format is that he feels less bound to linear plot progression onstage. He emphasized that his intent is neither to track the disease nor to document a concentration-camp experience in the manner that Schindler’s List or Life Is Beautiful detail the Holocaust.

"I don’t know if one play can be everything. It can have multiple levels, but a play has to have a clear point of view. This is a play about a man’s struggle to deal with the past — which is now surfacing — and Alzheimer’s. But it’s really about a family and how they deal with what’s happening," he said.

Observing as the actors breathe life into the characters’ past and present struggles has revealed aspects of the play Bogart hadn’t realized were there. "It’s incredible to see the director and actors go places and illuminate dimensions and textures you didn’t even consider while writing," he said. "I love seeing them make choices and take risks and not get too caught up with what’s in the text on the paper."

Conspiracy of Memory is presented by Boston Theatre Works at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, February 5 through 22. Tickets are $20 to $25. Call (617) 939-9939.