Getting to the dark heart of ‘Conspiracy’
In 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi officers and German bureaucrats gathered in a villa in a lakeside suburb of Berlin for a secret meeting to discuss the extermination of every Jew in Europe. In 1997, Emmy Award-winning writer Loring Mandel began to craft a screenplay based on the only known surviving record of the Wannsee Conference, where momentum built behind the Final Solution. His work eventually became the 2001 HBO movie “Conspiracy,” starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. In 2012, Caleb Thompson ’14 traveled to New York for an afternoon meeting with Mandel and his agent at the Museum of Modern Art to talk about bringing a version of Mandel’s theatrical adaptation of the screenplay to Harvard. This weekend, “Conspiracy,” a Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) production, premieres at the Loeb Mainstage at the American Repertory Theater. Thompson is the play’s director. The story has been brought to the stage only once before, in an amateur...