Gail Louw’s play “Blonde Poison” doesn’t ask audiences to forgive Stella Goldschlag, a Jew who became a Gestapo informer. Carol Adams, who is touring in the one-woman show, says: “The play is not an homage, but an opportunity to learn another perspective.”
Louw, a South African native who is Jewish and now lives in England, based her one-woman play on “Stella: One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal and Survival in Hitler’s Germany,” a book by Peter Wyden, a childhood friend of Goldschlag’s in Germany before the war. Louw has said her life was shaped by the deaths of her mother’s parents in a concentration camp and “the rich culture of her upbringing.”
Goldschlag, portrayed in her 60s in the play, talks with an interviewer about her past. As a young woman in Berlin, she was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and tortured. She was told she could save herself and her parents from the death camps if she would work as a greifer, informing on Jews in hiding.
Goldschlag turned out to be good at it, and the Gestapo nicknamed her “Blonde Poison.” Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews — including former schoolmates — were captured because of her.
“Gail has written a marvelous character,” Adams says. “This is not a simplistic play, and Stella is not portrayed as just a monster. You hear how she made each decision that led to her becoming an informer. Throughout the play, you don’t want to like her, but you start to see how it happened.
“You wonder what you would have done under the same circumstances. That’s important, because good theater should make you look inside yourself.”
After seeing Adams perform “Blonde Poison” in Florida, a woman told her: “I am Jewish, and I had never heard this part of our story. This is a darker side, but this is important.”
Adams, 55, first learned about “Blonde Poison” late in 2014, when the Verona Studio, a theater company in Salem, Oregon, near Adams’ home in Silverton, approached her about playing the role of Goldschlag.
Adams, a veteran actor and professional voice-over artist, says the sum of her training and experience led to what she called “the role of a lifetime.” She is the only performer now touring with “Blonde Poison” and said she does so with the playwright’s blessing.
“Gail encouraged me to take the show on tour,” she says. “When I performed the role in Oregon, during an interview with Oregon Public Radio, I did part of a scene. Gail heard the program and contacted me to say she loved my accent and the way I played the part.”
Adams is not Jewish, but notes that as a lifelong history buff she has always been interested in the pre-World War II period. The play reveals what life was like then in Germany.
“In a way, the whole play is a big reveal into who Stella was, what shaped her, how she was betrayed and then betrayed others,” Adams says. “After the war, she was tried and sentenced to serve 10 years in a work camp, but I’m not certain she ever felt guilty.”
As she prepared to begin a fall tour that will include mid-September performances at the San Francisco Fringe Festival, Adams said she still was finding nuance in the play. She credits director Susan Coromel for leading her to ever-deeper layers in the writing and the character.
“I’m always finding new nuggets,” she says, “and of course it’s difficult not to see parallels to today in the theme, what with the current political climate.”
“Blonde Poison” on Sept. 10, 16, 17 and 22 at the Exit Theatre Studio, 156 Eddy Street, San Francisco. Tickets $11. For more information, www.sffringe.org/blonde.