“There’s something that people never say about the Nazis now,” says Lemon toward the close of Wallace Shawn’s play. She is sitting quietly in a chair, hands folded in her lap, surrounded by shelves and shelves of medicine bottles and fruit juices, chatting demurely to the audience. If we have any inkling that the play is about to end, it’s because this is where we came in.

In gentle, mellifluous tones and the singsong voice that one uses for explaining very, very difficult things to children, Lemon proceeds to tell us why it is “absurd to talk about the Nazis as if the Nazis were unique.” For, as Lemon explains, “the mere fact of killing human beings in order to create a certain way of life is not something that exactly distinguishes the Nazis from everybody else.” To illustrate her point, Lemon refers us to society’s treatment of criminals (whom, she suggests, we would simply exterminate if ever they got to be so much of a problem “that our most basic hopes as a society were truly threatened by them”) and also to the fate of the American Indians (whom, Lemon points out, the European settlers slaughtered in order “to build the kind of society the Europeans wanted”). “So,” she concludes, “it becomes absurd to talk about the Nazis as if the Nazis were unique.”