Passion and Politics
Miami playwright premieres controversial love story

Colin McPhillamy and Amy Mckenna in a scene from A Report on the Banality of Love, by Miami playwright Mario Diament, which will make its world premiere at the Promethean Theatre Photo: George Schiavone

It’s one of the more fascinating love stories of the 20th century. Hannah Arendt, one of the prominent political theorist and a Jewish woman, fell in love with her philosophy professor Martin Heidegger, who later became a member of the Nazi party. And in January, you see The Promethean Theatre’s dramatization of the story, Mario Diament’s A Report on the Banality of Love.

Diament found the found the story of Arendt and Heidegger through watching a documentary on the Adolph Eichmann trail, at which Arendt spoke. Diament “found the story fascinating,” finding it to be “more a story of passion than…of the Holocaust.” Diament was interested in the two of the most formidable minds in the 20th century having a relationship that sounds like it comes from a bad country song, where a woman loves her man even when he beats her. So he read as many books as he could, including Arendt’s and Heidegger’s correspondence, and created a play that surrounds five of their encounters.