Inside the jail cell, the police officer is registering his freshly arrested prisoner -- a young Jewish woman suspected of political criminality. It is 1933 in Berlin, where determining who belongs and who doesn't is of paramount concern to the government. So he inquires about her birthplace (Germany) and her parents' (same). And her parents' parents'.
"My father's family lived in Königsberg for 200 years," she tells him.
"Oh!" he says, not unpleasantly. "And before that?"
Jenny Lyn Bader's play "Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library," at WP Theater, is inspired by real events. The married woman of the title is better known as the writer Hannah Arendt, who was indeed arrested in 1933, before she fled Germany.
Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, "Mrs. Stern" is one of two thought-provoking plays on small Manhattan stages in which pernicious patterns figure heavily. Watching Bader's drama, though, the repetition is evident not in the text but in global trends -- in every nation that has embraced some strain of nativism or clamped down on freedom of expression, association, inquiry.
Hannah (Ella Dershowitz) has been hauled in for allegedly making the Nazis look bad: mimeographing antisemitic statements and imagery published in German newspapers for a Zionist group to disseminate abroad. A librarian reported her. Now Hannah, with her agile intellect, aims to unlock the humanity in Karl (Brett Temple), the police officer, and thereby free herself.
In this well-acted, precisely calibrated production by Luna Stage, she jokes, she flatters, she takes advantage of assumptions about female naïveté. Painting herself as dreamily curious and irreproachably truthful, she introduces moral doubt that smudges the crisp corners of Karl's certainty. She plays him, really, but what she appeals to is his decency -- his capacity for loving his neighbor as himself. A low priority, historically, once fascism rears its head.
Arendt makes a brief appearance, too, in Kallan Dana's brightly surreal, loopily comic play "Racecar Racecar Racecar," at A.R.T./New York Theaters -- or her most famous phrase does, anyway.
"Oh my God, is this the banality of evil?" the Daughter (an excellent Julia Greer) asks, midway through a cross-country road trip with her father, when a hitchhiker they picked up turns out, maybe, to be a predator.
The correlation between perception and actuality is slippery for the Daughter and her Dad (Bruce McKenzie, also terrific). They lead heedless, profoundly alcoholic lives: a way of being that he instilled in her from the time she was small, just as he taught her the route between the East Coast and the West by traveling it so many times, and schooled her in a love of palindromes. (The show's title? Palindrome.)
Inventively staged by Sarah Blush for the Hearth, "Racecar" is linguistically frolicsome, emotionally unflinching and set at Christmastime. As a holiday play laced with trauma, it's right up there with Leslye Headland's "Cult of Love."
The Daughter and the Dad trace the well-worn grooves of habit, backward and forward, always the same. In the shambles they keep making, the only thing not broken is the pattern that's killing them.
Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library
Through Jan. 12 at WP Theater, Manhattan; mrssternwanders.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Racecar Racecar Racecar
Through Sunday at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; thehearththeater.com. Running time: 1 hour.