Hans Litten, the eponymous hero of the play subtitled The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler, was an attorney in Weimar Germany. His father was a law professor. Both had been baptized Lutheran to help them skirt antisemitism and advance in their careers.
At heart, though, Hans is an atheist: if there is a supreme being, he believes it is Mozart—or perhaps Rainer Maria Rilke, many of whose poems he long ago committed to memory.
Hans’s law partner Barbasch (Dave Stishan) brings in clients mostly from the working-class and hence mostly communists. Unlike Hans’s father (Stan Buturla) and members of the political establishment, Hans (Daniel Yaiullo) is convinced that communism poses no threat to his country because Germany, like England per the old canard, is a bourgeois “nation of shopkeepers.”
But he is equally skeptical of nationalism. He refuses to believe that “ordinary Germans” will rally around the rising National Socialist party led by Adolf Hitler. To prove it—or so he thinks—he will publicly embarrass Hitler by exposing his hypocrisy: have him admit, under oath, that while he claims to want peaceful change, he actually espouses and encourages violence.
His chance comes when paramilitary (S.A.) storm-troopers crash a communist café and beat up the patrons. Two are brought to trial for assault, but they claim self-defense. Under German criminal law, victims can question the defendants or—in this case—hire an attorney to do that. Since Hans is sure the Nazis are guided by orders from their party’s leader, he subpoenas Hitler (Zack Calhoon) and puts him on the stand. (Not exactly a cross-examination, but it makes for a catchy subtitle.)
No transcript survives, so playwright Douglas Lackey has drawn on historical sources for dialog both in and out of court. Hitler is not cowed. He never concedes that his manifesto “Mein Kampf” or any of his speeches are a call to arms. And one of the storm troopers (Robert Ierardi), though convicted by the judge (Mark Eugene Vaughn), remains defiant and promises to get even with Hans.
No surprise: Hitler becomes Chancellor, and Hans is arrested, ostensibly for knowing who set the Reichstag fire. He is tortured and moved to increasingly bleak concentration camps—ultimately Dachau—despite the efforts of his mother (Barbara McCulloh) to have him released.
Under Alexander Harrington’s direction, on a cleverly versatile three-part set (by Alex Roe) the actors (costumed by Anthony Paul-Cavaretta) believably inhabit their roles. Shoutout to Roe and to Lighting Director Alexander Bartenieff for the surprising way Act I ends.
Jessica Crandall is Music Director, and there is music throughout the play: from Mozart on records to a cameo beer-hall rendition of “The Alabama Song” by Hans’s friends Kurt Weill (Whit K. Lee) and Bertoldt Brecht (Marco Torriani). Girding themselves against their forced labor, Hans and his fellow Dachau inmates sing “The Peat Bog Soldiers,” and they counter the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessell Song” with “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” [thoughts are free].
In a beer hall (l-r), composer Kurt Weill (Whit K. Lee) urges Hans (Daniel Yaiullo) to flee Germany, to the amusement of Hans’s law partner Barbasch (Dave Stishan) and Weill’s lyricist Bertoldt Brecht (Marco Torriano). Photo by Ben Hider.
This play is necessarily dark. Everyone nowadays knows that intelligent people—Jews especially, even the ostensibly converted, like Hans— failed to see or chose to ignore the threat until it was too late. In real life Hans died in 1938 in Dachau (in the play, apparently, somehow, by suicide), months before Kristallnacht.
Lackey is a professor of philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY, and his plays are rife with contentious issues of belief and ethics, especially those he calls “comedies of ideas,” such as Four Evangelists Walk Into a Fog and Spies For the Pope. Those were produced downtown at Theater for the New City; Hans Litten gets a 99-seat house and higher production values at Theatre Row on 42nd Street.
“My goal,” says Lackey in the Playbill, “is to write plays with exciting stories, smart characters, and sharp dialog. I’m tired of plays about dysfunctional families and jumbled identities. For me, ideas are more exciting. History is more exciting. I want characters that can think.”
Opening Photo: Storm-troopers (Robert Ierardi and Dave Stishan) stand watch in the courtroom as Hans Litten (Daniel Yaiullo) questions Hitler (Zack Calhoon) by Ben Hider
Hans Littel: the Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd Street
Through February 21, 2026
