THEATER REVIEW
Strong voices and difficult choices in Shakespeare & Company’s ‘The Victim’
By Don Aucoin, Globe correspondent, Updated July 9, 2025
LENOX — Stories possess a power all their own. Among other things, they can serve as a way for the past to speak to the future.
That’s an especially urgent task when, as in Lawrence Goodman’s “The Victim,” the subjects of that conversation are as monumental — and as dispiritingly persistent — as genocide and racism.
It’s notable that Goodman chose to use a singular noun in the play’s title. So much of human history is a chronicle of suffering, often occurring on a mass scale. But when a writer sets out to capture that bleak panorama, working in close-up can be, paradoxical though it may seem, an approach that creates a bigger, fuller picture.
There’s enduring wisdom in E.B. White’s famous advice to young writers: “Don’t write about Man. Write about a man.” In another words, tell a story about one person or a small group of people that helps illuminate the larger story.
From left: Stephanie Clayman, Yvette King, and Annette Miller in “The Victim.” MAGGIE HALL
Director Daniel Gidron touches upon that larger story in a program note for his Shakespeare & Company premiere of “The Victim.” Gidron writes that Goodman’s play “demands we make near-impossible moral judgments at this fearful American moment of confusion and crisis.”
Theater-makers frequently try to link their productions to the current political or social environment. Those linkages can feel contrived or overwrought, a strained attempt to find “relevance.”
Not this time. Not when each day in America seems to bring new, ominous images that suggest the machinery of authoritarianism is revving up. (Men in masks snatching people off the street? Really?) Not when certain elected leaders see political gain in pitting us against one another.
“The Victim” is built on three interconnected monologues among women of three different generations: Ruth (the redoubtable Annette Miller), a Holocaust survivor in her 70s; Daphne (Stephanie Clayman), a New York physician in her early 50s; and Maria (Yvette King), a caregiver in her late 20s.
While our current predicament is never far from the mind when watching “The Victim,” Gidron and his topflight trio of actors make sure to pull us into the particulars of their characters’ lives and experiences. There is a specificity to their portrayals; there’s nothing facile or abstract about Goodman’s writing, and the cast brings a similar rigor to their performances.
When they are not speaking, the actors sit impassively in chairs at the edge of the stage in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre. Miller, Clayman, and King give performances that are compelling by dint of their sheer discipline.
Their delivery is measured, as if they are giving testimony, until and unless they need to dial it up to drive home the horror of a particular event. Each of the performances contains its own stand-alone force, while also adding to the cumulative impact of “The Victim.”
First to speak is Daphne, who spells out what happened to her mother, Ruth (Miller). When she was 12, the Nazis invaded Ruth’s town in Ukraine, forced 800 Jewish residents to disrobe, herded them into a large ditch, then systematically murdered them. Ruth somehow survived and spent two days hidden beneath the dead bodies of her mother, father, and three sisters.
Daphne has undergone racial diversity training at work. In light of that harrowing family history, Daphne objects to the term “white privilege.” As the COVID-19 pandemic creates overcrowding in the hospital where she works, Daphne, her heart hardened, draws the wrong lesson from that training and makes a terrible choice, responding to a Latino patient in crisis with shocking inhumanity.
Next to speak is Maria (King), the daughter of that patient. A Dominican-American home health aide in her late 20s who immigrated to the US legally, Maria had accepted Daphne’s offer of a job as caregiver for Ruth, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The relationship of employer and employee is a minefield from the start in both their tellings; Daphne reacts with furious disbelief when Maria seems to equate Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo with Hitler.
Maria’s own mother has health issues, and when the mother experiences a medical emergency, Maria makes a quick judgment call that brings matters to a full boil with Daphne. Meanwhile, Maria’s young son has been called an ethnic slur in his school. Fear has entered the life of a formerly confident kid.
Last to speak is Ruth, who begins with the moment her 12-year-old self emerged from that mass grave in Ukraine and went in search of shelter and protection.
What she found initially seems like the opposite of both, a kind of brutalization by other means. But humanity is full of surprises. Ruth’s life is saved when the least likely of people makes a choice that reflects the trace of goodness that remains.
THE VICTIM
Play by William Gibson
Directed by Daniel Gidron
Play by Lawrence Goodman. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Shakespeare & Company, Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Lenox. Through July 20. Tickets $27-$85. At 413-637-3353, shakespeare.org