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'We don't want to alarm people', a police captain tells a colleague near the beginning of "Incident at Vichy." The comment resonates with irony, as most of the men around them, who have been taken off the streets, supposedly so that their identity papers can be verified, but, in fact, so that they can be revealed as Jewish and sent to concentration camps. By "people," the captain refers to the non-Jewish French population, some of whom would surely be alarmed if they were aware of what was happening between them. The play takes place in 1942, before the horror of the Holocaust was known. Incident in Vichy is a 1964 play by American playwright Arthur Miller about a group of men arrested in Vichy France who wait without knowing, for what turns out to be their "racial" inspection by German military officers and the French Vichy police during the Second World War. It focuses on the themes of human nature, guilt, fear and complicity, and examines how the Nazis were able to perpetrate the Holocaust with so little resistance. This 2015 performance at the Signature Theater in Manhattan celebrates the Centennial of the birth of Arthur Miller. Directed by Michael Wilson and starring David Abeles, Curtis Billings, James Carpinello, AJ Cedeno, Quinlan Corbett, Brian Cross, Demosthenes Chrysan, Jonathan Gordon, Jonathan Hadary, Alex Morf, Jonny Orsini, Darren Pettie, John Procaccino, Alec Shaw, Derek Smith, Richard Thomas, and Evan Zes.
