The Contradiction Next Door
PHILADELPHIA & ST. PAUL, MINN.: For years in the Polish town of Jedwabne, a stone marker commemorated the brutal massacre of hundreds of Jews, burned alive by German troops during the Nazi occupation. In the controversial book Neighbors, released in 2001, historian Jan Tomasz Gross disputed that version of events, placing the responsibility for the mass execution instead on the citizens of Jedwabne, the friends and neighbors of the very people who were killed.
Inspired by Gross’s book, Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek wrote the play Our Class, which was translated into English by Ryan Craig and premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2009. Our Class received its U.S. premiere at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater in October and will run through Nov. 13. A second production has opened at the Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company and will play through Nov. 20.
Beginning in 1925, the play traces eight decades in the lives of 10 classmates—half Catholic, half Jewish—who, through teasing and flirting, declare their ambitions for the future and affection for each other. Everything changes when Russian and German invading forces tear their country apart and—for nationalism, idealism or simple survival—the one-time friends betray one another and commit acts of unspeakable violence.
Wilma Theater artistic director Blanka Zizka, who directs the play, was attracted to its complexities. “All the characters, even the ‘villains,’ have profound human emotions. One can commit brutal violence and love his family. One can be a victim and not a very popular person. A survivor can turn into a bitter person, while one can become ashamed of a heroic deed. This play is full of contradictions.”
The controversy of the story rests in the way unforgivable events are remembered, a question faced by many individuals and nations grappling with their own histories. Says Zizka, “It’s shocking to find out that history is different from what was learned in school. It’s shocking to find out that your countrymen are not only victims but also perpetrators of violence, and it’s difficult to accept the collective responsibility. The controversy is partially a fight over legacy, historical narrative and national identity.”
The play questions how we exist beside neighbors who are so different from us, and how we uncover the truth hidden inside disparate versions of history. Without asserting moral judgment, Our Class explores the extreme circumstances that can lead a person to turn against a neighbor. Its chorus of voices creates a rich historical world in which the audience can find its own understanding.
—Margot Melcon
Dancing With the Devil
SAN FRANCISCO: The year 1918 was a lean one for Igor Stravinsky. Not only was Europe reeling from the Great War, but the recent Russian Revolution had effectively cut off the composer’s royalties. So Stravinsky did what a lot of artists do when faced with tough times: He stripped his work down, writing a chamber piece designed to tour. The result, L’Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale), has mainly survived as a popular concert piece with narration, à la Peter and the Wolf, though this jazz-inflected parable, with a script by the Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz, was originally conceived for seven instruments, with three actors and a dancer.
“Usually one art form is taking it over—it’s either staged as a ballet or as a piece of music,” says Muriel Maffre, a former principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet, who had the alternative idea of staging Soldier’s Tale as a dance-theatre piece with music on one of her favorite local stages, Aurora Theatre Company, where it will play Nov. 11-Dec. 18. Maffre will both dance the part of the “daughter of the king” (as director Tom Ross puts it, “Muriel doesn’t want to be called ‘princess’ ”) and manipulate a life-size puppet of the soldier, created by Seattle-based puppeteer David Densmore.
“It goes along with Aurora being a chamber theatre,” says Ross, artistic director of the company, now entering its 20th year. Indeed, the company’s 150-seat space promises an intimate experience of the work, with Stravinsky’s score rendered by just four musicians and a cast that includes Muriel, the puppet soldier, one actor to narrate and another to play the devil. “It’s kind of a mash-up of fairy tales,” Ross says of Ramuz’s script, which tells of a soldier making a deal with the devil, trading his fiddle for a book of knowledge. Assorted tricks and intrigues ensue, but just when the soldier thinks he’s outsmarted Old Scratch, Ross says, “The devil comes back, like at the end of a De Palma film.”
Story aside, the main impetus for this production is the unlikely union of dancer and venue. “The idea of Muriel dancing on my stage was really cool,” Ross effuses. One crucial hoofer’s question, though: Does the Aurora stage have a sprung floor? No, admits Maffre, who danced with the San Francisco Ballet for 17 years. “But it’s wood, not concrete. It’s not hardcore dancing.” She pauses, then adds with a laugh, “Ask me again after 39 performances!”
—Rob Weinert-Kendt
Magno in His Own Words
LOS ANGELES: Lonnie Carter’s The Romance of Magno Rubio, based on a story by Carlos Bulosan, first charmed Ma-Yi Theatre Company audiences in NYC in 2002 with its bittersweet depiction of the lives of 1930s Filipino migrant workers. Bernardo Bernardo acted in three subsequent stagings—at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, NYC’s Culture Project and Los Angeles’s Latino Theater Company—and now he directs the latest at L.A.’s PAE Live! (Nov. 4–Dec. 11). His production focuses on the contrast between Magno’s lovesick fantasies and “the grittier side of reality faced daily by mud-encrusted stoop laborers negotiating the rising cost of pursuing the American dream.” Some of the PAE performances use the original, rhythmic English script; others showcase a new Tagalog version by Bernardo. He proudly quotes UCLA lecturer Nenita Pambid Domingo’s reaction to a reading of his translation: “It was as if the native language shared by the audience and the performers pierced through the guts and activated cultural connections.” Or, in Bernardo’s own words: “It is time to tell our story, our way.”
—Nicole Estvanik Taylor
A Life in Verse
LOWELL, MASS.: A one-man show about poet Robert Frost? For playwright A.M. Dolan, that was the road less traveled—and for him it has made all the difference: “I had no idea how entertaining Frost was as a performer of his own poetry, or how much more than a ‘pastoral’ or ‘New England’ poet he was.” Proof of this can be found in Dolan’s play This Verse Business, currently running at Merrimack Repertory Theatre through Nov. 13, after a stint last year at New Hampshire’s Peterborough Players.
Before starting work on This Verse Business, Dolan pictured Frost as a “genial, whitehaired bard of the back country.” That changed when he encountered recordings of Frost’s dynamic cross-country readings: “When I started listening to tapes of these talks, and reading the biographies, letters and prose writings, I slowly realized I might have a play.” Turns out the poet “was a bit of a ham,” says Dolan. “He loved to say something memorable to a big group, and once described Hell as a half-filled auditorium.”
No such unpleasantries should accompany Tony nominee Gordon Clapp as he fills Frost’s shoes under Gus Kaikkonen’s direction. “Watching Gordon grow into the role of Frost has been like standing over the shoulder of a great poet and watching him write his next verse—amazing,” Dolan declares. So amazing, in fact, that “we’ve taken the liberty of allowing our stage Frost to be better than the man himself at saying his poems,” he remarks. “I think Frost would approve.”
—Harrison Hill
Say It Once
NEW YORK CITY: Two musicians, anonymously called Guy and Girl, meet on the streets of Dublin. Over the course of a week, they fall in love—and the songs they write, folk-rock tunes about romantic yearning, mirror their relationship.
This is the basis for the award-winning 2006 Irish film Once, written and directed by John Carney, which has been adapted into a musical by another Irish writer, playwright Enda Walsh. He was initially attracted to the project because of its innocence. “A friend of mine was really surprised that I had taken it on,” Walsh recalls. “And it does feel like it’s a magic gift for myself, a way to exercise a lightness inside of me.” Lightness hasn’t been an evident quality in Walsh’s work. His previous attempt at a love story, Disco Pigs, was a foul-mouthed affair about an obsessive and violent relationship that ends tragically.
Running Nov. 15-Jan. 1 at New York Theatre Workshop with John Tiffany directing, Once will be Walsh’s first musical and his first go-around at writing a heartwarming love story. The score is written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who played the leads in the film and earned a best-original-song Oscar for “Falling Slowly.”
Walsh had to modify the film’s terse dialogue, which he says “disappears on stage. It needs to be more robust. It needs to have sort of an itchy quality, a bit of pace about it.”
The musical’s 13 actors play their own instruments on stage; there is no backing orchestra. This keeps the focus of the show on the music, he says, rather than the dialogue. It also means leaving out the lyrical, sometimes equivocal, monologues that are usually the signature pieces in Walsh’s plays.
“All of their massive hearts are in their songs,” Walsh enthuses. “My job, narratively, is to make sure the songs really deliver. We actually need to hear a beautiful song when they run out of my fucking dialogue!”
—Diep Tran
Free Your Mind
NEW YORK CITY: Acting in Lucy Thurber’s play Scarcity inspired Jesse Eisenberg to write a drama of his own. “In Scarcity there was a side story about a rich woman who goes to a working-class town to ‘do good,’” says the actor, best known for impersonating Facebook’s phenomenally wealthy founder in the 2010 hit film The Social Network. “I thought it’d be interesting to write a play where privileged people are the protagonists—and to see the unraveling of someone who claims to have great convictions.” Eisenberg’s interest in politics and his own sense of unease over being in a position of privilege fueled the impetus to pen Asuncion, which runs through Nov. 27 at Cherry Lane Theatre, in a production mounted by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. “It was fun to write because even having guilt about being in a position of privilege is obnoxious,” Eisenberg says with a self-deprecating laugh.
In Asuncion, directed by Kip Fagan, Eisenberg himself plays Edgar, a blogger who rails against American imperialism while living with Vinny, a white man pursuing a Ph.D. in black studies. When Edgar’s brother marries a Filipino woman who needs to stay at the duo’s apartment, Edgar and Vinny’s self-proclaimed open-mindedness is tested.
“What I love about this play is that it’s a character-based satire. It’s not coming from a making-your-point perspective,” says Fagan. Eisenberg concurs: “I feel a lot of love for Edgar—the play skewers his ineffectuality, not him.” Eisenberg wrote the first draft of Asuncion back in 2007. After Obama was elected, he wondered if the play would be less relevant. “But now with the backlash against Obama and the veiled racism of the Tea Party, I think it’s timely,” he ventures. When Fagan backs up his point by mentioning such Obama critics as Tavis Smiley, Eisenberg interjects with a sly smile, “More like Tavis Frownley.”
—Eliza Bent
Almanac
110 Years Ago (1901)
Funny-faced character actor Paul Ford is born in Baltimore, Md. Ford’s best-known roles will come later in life, among them the befuddled Mayor Shinn of The Music Man, both on Broadway and on film.
90 Years Ago (1921)
Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie opens on Broadway. Though it runs for only 122 performances, the play will earn O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It will also be adapted into a 1930 feature film starring Greta Garbo.
50 Years Ago (1966)
Kander and Ebb’s classic World War II musical Cabaret opens at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre. Cabaret will receive two subsequent Broadway revivals, and the three New York productions will collectively chalk up a staggering 3,879 performances.
15 Years Ago (1996)
A revival of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, with Bob Fosse-inspired choreography, opens on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. The production will garner six Tonys and will eventually attract a string of celebrity guest stars, such as Melanie Griffith and Usher. By its 15th anniversary Chicago will play more than 6,100 times times, making it Broadway’s fifth-longest-running show.
