Dietrich Danzig

A Drama in Two Acts

Writers Guild of Canada Registered #S13-02672

 

WINNING SELECTION

2014 LONG BEACH PLAYHOUSE NEW WORKS FESTIVAL

 

Although a fictitious character set against a historical background, Dietrich Danzig is the last known living survivor of the Pink Triangles arrested for homosexuality during the reign of the Third Reich.  Through a 2011 interview with Dr. Theodore Bitten of the United States Holocaust Museum, Dietrich, at the age of 95, takes us back to 1935 where we are led into his young life as a successful ballet dancer with the Berlin Staatsoper; a gay man suppressed by the enforcement of immorality law Paragraph 175; a lover pursing an impossible romance with a conflicted childhood pal forced by his stepfather to be a Nazi officer; and a victim of tragic circumstance that leads to his internment in Dachau.

 

Dietrich Danzig is a story about having the courage to embrace who you are while living in the face of authorized hatred and it serves to remind everyone that LGBT inhumanities and oppression still continue throughout the world.

 

© Copyright 2013 by John Pisano-Thomsen