BRATTLEBORO — Psychologist and actor Ron Goldman has long been troubled about complex conflicts generated in him by the loss of his mother's family in the Holocaust.
He has often asked himself how much did he really want to know and, once he did know, how could he face up to those painful events.
After much soul searching, he discovered an interesting way to confront his family history: turn it into a play.
On Saturday, Jan. 30, at 8 p.m., the Hooker-Dunham Theater presents To Know or Not to Know: That has Been The Question, a one-person show performed by Goldman who tells the story of his struggle coming to terms with a painful history that his family kept secret to protect everyone from agonizing truths.
Taking his audience on a journey from South Africa to San Francisco, as well as from Nazi Germany to Boston, Goldman explores his lifelong journey from silence to understanding as he learns to move from avoiding the truth to seeking it.
“I am the son of German Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany to South Africa, where I spent my youth,” says Goldman.
In the 1960s, after finishing high school when Goldman was 17, his family moved to New York.
“I also lived in San Francisco for a couple of years where I met my future wife, who coincidentally also was the daughter of Jewish refugees,” adds Goldman.
After some time teaching political science back in South Africa, Goldman returned to America and entered the doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to study the intersection of psychology and the social and political world.
This led him to years of intense study of humanistic psychology, including, most importantly, his own five-year long analysis, followed by three years of postgraduate training at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy, and two additional years with the Advanced Training Program at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.
“I opened my private psychotherapy practice in 1990, while I was still Associate Dean at Boston University's College of Communication,” Goldman writes at his website www.rongoldman.net.
In 1991, he left BU to establish a full-time practice, while also teaching at a number of local colleges and universities.
“Early on in my career I was powerfully influenced by [my former teacher] Bruno Bettelheim's brilliant book, The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. This led me to a career-long fascination with the relationship between psychotherapy and the arts,” writes Goldman.
“Acting is part of the this story too,” Goldman told The Commons. “In 1996, I had the opportunity to participate in intensive training as an actor with Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass., which enhanced my work as a practitioner of psychotherapy as well as developing a career performing and exploring the relationships between psychotherapy and theater.”
It was a life-changing experience.
“I found it important to train as a Shakespearean actor, and for many years I continued studying with Shakespeare and Co.,” he says.
His acting background was instrumental in his participation with The Ariel Group, an international training and coaching firm headquartered just outside of Boston.
“Ariel helps the businessmen develop 'presence,'” says Goldman. “It all began when one head of a corporation came to us and said, 'You actors have such presence on stage, we ought to learn that.'”
“We're comprised of performing artists and business professionals who believe the workplace functions better when people interact generously and communicate well,” writes Goldman on his website. “Using actor training techniques from the theater, our programs combine personal reflection, experiential classroom or virtual learning, and coaching and reinforcement to develop key presence, communication and relationship-building skills.”
Goldman's involvement with theater has developed beyond mere acting.
“In addition to helping develop me as a psychotherapist, I have also written and performed original works intended to demonstrate the relationships between psychotherapy and theater,” Goldman writes.
“In 2002, I wrote with Marjorie Zohn, Interplay, a one-person play, that tells the story about an elderly psychoanalyst [based on Bettelheim] and his treatment of an actor who keeps forgetting his lines,” he says.
Goldman performed the play over several years in Lenox, Boston, Santa Fe, and St. Louis.
His newest one-person show, To Know or Not to Know: That has Been The Question, is an attempt to find out what happened to his relatives in Nazi Germany.
“I knew really quite little about my family's background,” Goldman admits. “Until 1959, no one was talking about the holocaust at all. It was still too close and too painful. Then Elie Wiesel published Night, a work about his experience with his father in the German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–45.”
Goldman was not sure if he ever wanted to know about that past. This very ambivalence becomes the theme of the one-person show.
“The work is about the effort it takes to know and also to not know, that is, to keep bad and painful things at bay,” he says. “Ultimately I needed to know. You could call the show a form of psychotherapy, since it documents the unfolding and breaking down of resistance in my blocking of the past.
“But at the same time, I must add that I have the appreciation, and the necessity for, our resistance to face traumatic events. People put up barriers for a reason.
“Nonetheless, I hope to emphasize in the show my belief that human growth is possible, and that there is virtue in facing oneself and one's history.”
To Know or Not to Know is a series of different stories on the theme.
“I want people to go with me on this journey to be entertained and moved by what they hear,” he says.
No matter how weighty his themes, Goldman wants to emphasize that his show is a story, not a lecture.
“The work developed out of a StorySlam in Boston that I participated in,” he explains. “Then it was quite short, a mere five minutes. But because of the enthusiastic response, I was inspired to take it to a longer form.”
Goldman believes that the great interest in the power of storytelling these days has enabled him to put this show together, and with the help of his director, Amy Goldfarb, to confront issues he has long evaded.
“Storytelling is the great form of discovery; it is part of what makes us human,” Goldman claims. “Someone once said that God invented people because he loves to hear a great story.”
To Know or Not to Know premiered in October 2014.
“However, I have not given that many performances of it,” says Goldman. “One memorable time was at an assisted living community in Boston. When I gave the show in Warren, Vt., last summer, Ellie Goldfarb, Amy's sister, said we had to bring it to Brattleboro where it would be a great inspiration for our friends and neighbors.”
Goldman knows the town. “I am looking forward to seeing Brattleboro again,” he says. “I have fond memories of the place. When I was at UMass, I used to go visit there often, and made some good friends from people at the School for International Training.”
A discussion will follow To Know or Not to Know. At his other performances, Goldman discovered that many responses came from those people deeply affected by the events of World War II.
Yet all in all, Goldman feels that Americans seem to be reticent to confront past history.
“It is very different in Germany,” he says. “Three city blocks in Berlin are set aside as a memorial for the murder of the Jews of Europe. I find it striking that they do not say 'victims of the Holocaust,' but rather make it more immediate and personal.
“I am convinced that this general belief in their social responsibility is part of the reason the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, is so willing to take in the Syrian immigrants. She sees that the situation in Germany in the 1940s being re-enacted now as refugees fleeing their homeland try to find a place to live.”
Goldman is struck by how widespread remains the trauma from the events he talks about in To Know or Not to Know.
“Nor is it just about people who suffered 70 years ago,” he says. “Genocide and the displacement of masses of people goes on and on, as we can see now in Syria. How we respond to these events says what kind of people we are.”