Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp and Other Plays

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Reviewing a play without seeing it performed is always a difficult job.
The difficulty is doubled when that play happens to have a musical
score. Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp consists of a series of
monologues, solo songs, and infrequent dialogue. It is, in fact,
primarily a masque, and masques are meant to be seen, not read.

Despite its campy title, Ilsa deals with a serious subject. One of the
characters, Jim (a member of the Alberta Teachers’ Association),
denies the reality of the Holocaust; the concentration camps, he claims,
were actually “factories and potato fields full of peasants.” In a
parallel plot, we learn that Ilsa and the Colonel did indeed work in a
concentration camp, and that one of their jobs was to help Hitler
preserve some of his sperm “for the future.” When Ilsa and the
Colonel come face-to-face with Jim, high camp turns into irony as they
express anger and indignation at the teacher’s theories.

The play touches on many subjects—genetic experimentation, racism,
sexuality, and the consequences of history—but without any degree of
depth. As is typical of the masque form, the characters are
one-dimensional, perhaps even symbolic representations. The wit and
comedy found in the speeches are surprisingly missing from the songs.

As written text, Ilsa is a superficial treatment of serious subjects.
As performance art, as far as can be judged without an actual viewing,
it is probably an enjoyable if disturbing romp through some of the
darkest moments in Western history.