DECISIONS, DECISIONS : 'Judgment at Nuremberg' & 'Trappists'.

The dry ice is the first bad sign. In the minutes before the house lights dim at Broadway's Longacre Theatre, current home of the new play Judgment at Nuremberg, wisps of the artificial smoke slither out from behind an intimidating onstage tableau: a mammoth Third Reich eagle and a swastika, suspended in front of a blood-red scrim. Pure, unadulterated atmospherics, the tableau is the first of the many unnecessarily manipulative moments that freight the show, the inaugural stage production of Abby Mann's four-decade-old teleplay (and, later, screenplay) about the trial of Nazi war criminals. We hear the unnerving thud of soldiers marching goose step; we watch historical footage of the execution of Nazi leaders; we contemplate glowing sepia photos of Holocaust victims. Judgment's creators, it seems, do not trust us to respond to the play's disturbing themes in the right way, at the right time. And so, with no thought for subtlety, they have loaded the production with shock-value effects--and snippets of clunky dialogue--that emphasize the material's gravitas.

But do we really need dry ice to tell us that solemn events are underway in Judgment at Nuremberg, heretofore best known as the 1961 Academy Award-winning movie starring Spencer Tracy and featuring Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, and Burt Lancaster? Set in 1947, the story follows the trial of Ernst Janning, an elderly German judge who has sullied an otherwise eminent record by collaborating with the Nazi regime. When Judge Haywood, an unsophisticated American jurist, arrives to preside over the court, he finds himself knocked off balance not only by Richter-scale ethical questions, but also by seismic shifts in the international landscape--with the cold war lurching into motion, the American military is anxious to finesse the sentencing for the sake of creating European good will.

Is Janning culpable of legitimizing Nazi law? Or was he simply living up to his responsibilities as a judge? If he is guilty, are other Germans--like the glamorous Madame Bertholt, who befriends Haywood--guilty too? And moral issues aside, should Haywood and his fellow judges mitigate their verdicts in view of the Soviet threat to Berlin? The movie Judgment at Nuremberg (itself based on a TV drama that premiered in 1959) tempered its scrutiny of such weighty questions with magnetic psychological portraits. In particular, the quicksilver charm and fury of Maximilian Schell, as Janning's young defense attorney Oscar Rolfe, gave the legal deliberations a fascinating human center, while Spencer Tracy's aw-shucks persona as Haywood discreetly lightened the mood. Despite its Herculean 190-minute length, the Stanley Kramer-directed movie couldn't but entertain, no matter how much thought it provoked.

The same cannot be said of the play. Blame does not lie with the cast, which includes, in a much-publicized coup, Maximilian Schell; having scored an Oscar forty years ago for his portrait of Rolfe in the movie, the actor now plays Janning with persuasively grim authority and a grizzled beard. Michael Hayden, the play's Rolfe, tends toward a mannered opacity, but George Grizzard is a winner as the self-deprecating Haywood. Fidgeting with his hat and edging shyly into conversations, Grizzard fulfills the role's dramatic function more effectively than Tracy did--you always knew that Tracy could handle the challenges of the Nuremberg courtroom, whereas Grizzard seems fragile and fallible, qualities that might ratchet up suspense, did the production's portentousness not preclude any.

Instead, we get a kind of theatrical hand-wringing that always feels too prepackaged to have any real connection to our lives. The point of Abby Mann's script is to stress how wrenching and morally perilous the act of judgment is when it is not abstract. Haywood's sojourn in Nuremberg is agony because he can't coast into a paint-by-numbers verdict--because he learns that there is good in Janning; because the Allies, too, have inflicted suffering; because politics encroach on the courtroom; because he has to at least entertain the possibility of collective guilt. The ordeal should prompt us to reflect that we, too, are always muddling through ethical reality. Identifying with his dilemma, we should endure a little pity and terror.

As directed by John Tillinger, Judgment makes a token gesture of implicating us in the script's morally complex universe: when not lit up with the faces of Holocaust victims, the mirrored walls of the courtroom reflect the audience. But superfluous special effects work against moral immediacy--or any immediacy--by giving the show a celluloid feel. The play's creators have utterly failed to capitalize on the this-is-happening-here-and-now quality that is the theatre's trump card. In fact, given that entire scenes have apparently been cut-and-pasted directly from the forty-year-old screenplay, one can only conclude that no one associated with the production bothered to think through Judgment's viability as a play, and that's a muddle all its own.

While Ernst Janning was in the dock on Broadway, in early April, a different kind of trial was underway in a Lilliputian theater next to a comedy club, about two miles uptown. Inspired by Michael Mott's biography of Thomas Merton, Joseph P. Ritz's Trappists probes the final months, and the posthumous reputation, of Thomas Hogan, a Cistercian monk whose brilliant writings have earned him international fame but not inner peace. The play jumps back and forth between two narratives--Hogan's tortured love affair with a young nurse, and, many years later, the hostile encounter between the monastery's abbot and a hard-bitten female journalist seeking the dirt on Hogan's life.

Although both pairs of characters interact in situations of unusual intimacy--Hogan (Wayne Markover) and the nurse, Susan (Frances Sherman), treasure stolen moments of privacy; the journalist, Meredith Mallory (Alice King), is the first woman ever to enter the abbot's private office--all four are aware they are acting in the courtroom of public opinion. As if wrestling with their own consciences weren't anguish enough, Susan and Hogan have to consider future damage to the church: were Hogan to renounce his vows, he would disillusion the new believers he's won over through his writings. And Meredith, a lapsed Catholic outraged by the church's attitude toward women, is on the lookout for guilt. "Journalism is sometimes a modern form of the Inquisition," the abbot (R. J. Lewis) complains as he deflects her questions. "It has a priesthood that sometimes performs a great deal of cruelty for the sake of a greater good."

Directed by Marvin Kaye, the Open Book Theatre Company's bare-bones production lets the intelligent script speak for itself; with set and costumes pretty much stopping at a couple of cowls and a "Pax intrantibus" sign, you had to concentrate on the words. But that was a rewarding task: working around Susan and Hogan's extraordinarily moving love story, Ritz weaves together insights into faith, fame, personal responsibility, and the limits of human knowledge, giving his play a satisfying intellectual heft.

Lashed to its shoestring budget, Trappists fleeted through New York, playing for only two weekends (the script will appear in Incisions, an Open Book anthology forthcoming from Stage & Screen Book Club). But anyone who managed to catch both it and Judgment at Nuremberg had a sobering, double-barreled opportunity to reflect on what it means to pass judgment. As both plays show, the accused are never the only ones on trial.