We sat down with NYC playwright S.Dylan Zwickel’s who is bringing Moss Maidens to London after receiving excellent feedback after a celebrated, sold out run at the SheNYC festival last summer and has been optioned for a feature film.
Moss Maidens is set in the year 1941 and Isa, Rini, Silke, Helena, and Floor are five ordinary teenage girls living in a midsized Dutch town. They spend their days gossiping about their classmates, dreaming about their futures, and trying not to catch the eye of any of the Nazis that have taken up residence in their town. But when Rini, the romantic of the group, takes a walk in the woods with a Nazi who she’s hoping might be secretly a Resistance fighter and also her soulmate and sort-of-accidentally ends up killing him, the girls discover that they’re the last people anyone would ever suspect when harm befalls members of the invading army, and a new branch of the Resistance is born.
What initially drew you to the true story that inspired Moss Maidens, and what was the research process like?
Dylan: I first read an article about Hannie Schaft and Truus and Freddie Oversteegen many years ago, and I was immediately drawn to the idea of young women using their sexuality as a weapon in the fight for what’s right. It’s something I’ve always been interested in, actually – growing up, the story of Judith was always my favorite anecdote from Jewish history. My research for this play was very in depth – I started with the book Seducing and Killing Nazis by Sophie Poldermans, who was actually able to interview Truus and Freddie before their deaths in 2016 and 2018, and then for additional background I used the fantastic book The Diary Keepers by Nina Siegel, which is harrowing but provides so much insight into daily life in the Netherlands during World War II. The final and most important piece of my research was a trip to the Netherlands last year. It’s a jarringly beautiful country, peaceful in a way that makes it seem like nothing bad could ever happen there, but it had the worst Jewish survival rate in Western Europe during WWII (only 25%), so it was really interesting to try to reconcile those two facts in my own mind. The Resistance Museum in Amsterdam was an incredible resource – I learned so much about little details like Kraut Sieves (tools to tune out the official radio and access secret Resistance channels) that I never would have known about otherwise. I also got to visit the place where Hannie Schaft, the basis for my character Mirjam was executed, and it was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
How did you approach balancing historical accuracy with dramatic storytelling in the play?
Dylan: I deliberately chose to make my girls fictional characters rather than Freddie, Truus, and Hannie themselves so that I could tell the story I wanted to tell, even in places where it diverged from the actual specifics of their lives, without disrespecting them. That said, I strove for historical accuracy in terms of the arc of the war and my research on what daily life was like in that time and place, and I was true to the moral concerns of the real girls – Freddie and Truus emphasized in interviews later in their lives their struggle to maintain their humanity throughout their time in the Resistance, and that’s a major theme in the play.
Moss Maidens explores the moral complexities of resistance – what conversations do you hope it sparks among audiences?
Dylan: There’s a line in the play where Mirjam says, “Sometimes good people have to do ugly things to stop bad people from doing worse ones.” As an American, we’re going through a scary time in my country, and obviously I hope things don’t ever get anywhere close to what’s going on in this play, but I hope that people hear that and consider what it means to them and what kind of action might be required of them. There’s also a lot of conversation in the play about fighting an enemy without dehumanizing them, and, in the process, risking your own humanity, and I think that’s something everyone should be thinking about right now.
CKC: This play is a beautiful example of the power of community in times of adversity, conflict, and cruelty. These women discover, in the midst of war, that their courage to resist is greatly enhanced by the strength of their joyous friendship. We hope this piece empowers and encourages audiences to reflect on how they engage in resistance against such real and present threats today. We also hope it inspires our audience to look at how, historically, people worked to maintain their hope and humanity in the midst of it.
The play has already had a successful run in New York – did audience reactions there influence any changes for the UK premiere?
Dylan: I don’t know that audience reactions specifically influenced changes, but I have worked a lot on continuing to develop the piece based on what I learned from that process, including to delve further into the themes people really connected with, so UK audiences will be seeing an entirely new draft. And I do think it’ll be suited to the taste here, which I think sometimes accepts more nuance and ambiguity than the taste of American audiences, so I’m excited to see how it’s received.
CKC: We were lucky enough to be in the room for the first ever read-through of an early draft of The Moss Maidens in 2022. Even then, reading through only the first act, we knew it would be something special! We were unsurprised by its success in New York and are thrilled to bring the piece to the UK community.
Tickets are available for 30th and 31st March: https://www.thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk/the-moss-maidens