Messiah

Martin Sherman is an American playwright and screenwriter, known for the twenty plays of his that have been staged in more than sixty countries. He came to prominence in 1979 with Bent, which deals with the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust; it played on Broadway, was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play and won the Dramatists Guild's Hull-Warriner Award. Messiah, first staged in 1982 at the Hampstead Theatre in London, "treats the Jewish dilemma with humanity and humour" (Standard). In the seventeenth century, in the Polish village of Yultishk on the Ukrainian border, a Jewish community decimated by Cossack attacks finds hope in Shabbatai Zevi, a mysterious rabbi from Asia Minor whom everyone takes for the Messiah. Through the story of this seventeenth-century Sephardi rabbi, Martin Sherman examines religious fanaticism and obsessive orthodoxy through the eyes of the sharp-witted Rachel, and asks how the martyrs of history are to find deliverance when God appears to have died. Rachel addresses God without pause. But as the hope of the Jews collapses into a cruel mirage, she bitterly renounces him, only to realise that in denying his existence she is still speaking to him. Rachel declares that the true Messiah is "inside us", and that it falls to the Jews to save themselves.