Invisible Theatre Presents The Story Of Printmaker KätheKollwitz, Who Fought The Kaiser And The Nazis. By Margaret Regan DURING HER LONG, productive life, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) met with censorship more than once. Kollwitz was an Expressionist printmaker of progressive bent who made searing images of workers suffering in the big new industrial German cities. Her horrifying prints of mothers grasping their dead children grappled with the grief unleashed by the Germans' successive nationalist wars. Though the critics and public applauded her work, the authorities, needless to say, never took kindly to it. As early as 1899, the reactionary Kaiser Wilhelm II vetoed her nomination for a gold medal at an art show, because he disliked the political message in her work "A Weavers' Rebellion." In 1906, his wife ordered hundreds of copies of a Kollwitz poster pasted over on walls all over Berlin. The offending poster, which accurately depicted an exhausted female "home worker" who assembled products in her unhealthy tenement, was denounced as "gutter art" that showed only the ugly side of life. The Nazis couldn't have agreed more with the Kaiser and Kaiserina. Trying to whip up war fever in the late '30s, they particularly disliked Kollwitz's pacifist works. A new play making its premiere at Invisible Theatre fictionalizes the artist's real-life skirmishes with the Nazis when she was in her late sixties. Censored: The Story of Käthe Kollwitz takes place in the dark year of 1936, when, among their other more egregious sins, the Nazis were busily classifying the artworks of the nation as either "degenerate" or "German." They destroyed works like Kollwitz's that had been declared illegal. The play, written by Alvin J. Schnupp, a California professor, also undertakes a subplot about underground artists conspiring, at great risk, to save the art ordered for destruction. And woven into this subplot is a delicately rendered tale about awakening homosexuality. As the play opens, Kollwitz and her husband Karl, a physician, have already felt the Nazis' wrath. Both had signed an "urgent appeal" against the National Socialists and both had been quickly booted from their jobs in reprisal. (Kollwitz had been the first female professor at the Prussian Academy of Art). Kollwitz is beautifully played by longtime Tucson actress Jetti Ames in a determined, low-key performance shaded by both bitterness and feistiness. Despite the loss of her post and her studio, Kollwitz is continuing to make art at home. But even this small measure of peace is threatened when a Nazi minister of culture bursts in on her solitude. He orders her to recant some anti-government statements she made in a magazine article published in Russia. IT veteran James Blair plays the official, Ernst Lehrs, as a repressed, coldly polite monster-about-to-explode. The initial confrontation between the two sets up the dialectic of the play, with Kollwitz standing for integrity and the pursuit of truth, Lehrs for evil and hypocrisy. In subsequent scenes, they explain themselves to the other players. Sometimes, unbeknownst to them, and at different times, they address the same person, Lehrs' gay son, Georg (Adam D. Burke), who is slowly falling in love with one of the underground artists (Tom Toomey) trying to save Kollwitz' work. The playwright has set himself a tricky task in tackling a semi-historical play. He draws liberally on Kollwitz's diaries and letters and on the memoirs of Kollwitz's friend Beate Ludwig, portrayed by Suzi List, but Lehrs is his own creation. The writer's imagined explanations for what makes this Nazi officer tick are plausible, but they seem tired. Is there any other kind of Nazi besides the repressed, failed-artist homophobe? And Schnupp wants to get so much in about Kollwitz's fascinating life, from her apparent bisexuality to her support for abortion rights, that he takes the audience on too many dizzying--and confusing--flashbacks. Taped voice-overs unwisely distance the audience from the material. And by fast-forwarding nine years into the future at the conclusion, which is simply a wordy explanation of how everything turned out, the playwright sacrifices what should have been a powerful, emotional ending. Those criticisms aside, Schnupp and director Susan Claassen have succeeded in creating a compelling portrait of Kollwitz, owed in no small part to the fine work of Ames and to Kollwitz's own moving words quoted in the play. Kollwitz's long and, for her day, unusually egalitarian marriage, is warmly evoked in moving scenes with Karl, nicely played by William Lamar Killian. Tom Turner does a fine turn as creepy minor Nazi who blackmails a young artist. The play has no ready solutions to the perennial problem of government officials trying to censor dissident art, but it does everybody a service by documenting the case of one woman's courageous resistance. Today Käthe Kollwitz is an officially revered artist: there are two German museums dedicated solely to her work. But on her death in 1945, her Berlin home and much of her work destroyed in an Allied bombing, it looked to her as though the censors had prevailed. Censored: The Story of Käthe Kollwitz continues Tuesdays through Sundays through April 14 at Invisible Theatre, 1400 N. First Ave. (There will be no performance Easter Sunday, April 7). Curtain is at 8 p.m., with a 2 o'clock matinee Sunday, April 14. Tickets are $12 to $15. Dr. Mark Luprecht leads a free public forum entitled The Life and Times of Käthe Kollwitz and the Degenerate Art Exhibit from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6, at the theatre. There's also a panel discussion, Käthe Kollwitz--Freedom of Expression--The Debate Continues, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 13. For more information call 882-9721. A tiny show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art exhibits several Kollwitz works through the end of April. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information call 621-7567.

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