Based on Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors, Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class chronicles the destiny of 10 classmates over a period of 80 years.
Initially, we meet them in primary school in a small village in 1920s Poland. At this tender age the five Catholics and five Jews, three girls and seven boys, get along affably. However, as they grow up during and after the Soviet and Nazi occupations, the bonds splinter. Different ties form, born out of violence, death, trauma, and secrecy.
Adapted for the stage by Norman Allen and directed by Igor Golyak, this trenchant drama by Arlekin Players Theatre, inspired by true events, runs at Classic Shakespeare Company until November 3rd.
As Our Class develops, a horrific event magnifies the sub rosa tribalism and divisions inherent in the small town’s society. In an attempt to examine how authoritarian influences encourage violence and destroy love and wellness, the Polish playwright characterizes representatives of the townspeople who were victims and oppressors of the Jedwabne Pogrom in 1941. Those horrific events, stylized theatrically by the director, signify Poland’s collaboration with the Nazis in a persecution of the towns’ nearly 1,600 Jews.
Polish nationalists still deny their country’s complicity today, hiding behind laws that discourage speaking about atrocities committed during the occupation in an apparent bid to suppress public discourse and prevent dissent. This award-winning play is now condemned in Poland’s conservative circles as anti-Polish. Set in a time which presages the rise of global right-wing conservatism/nationalism, of book banning in the U.S. and the suppression of aspects of “inconvenient” U.S. history, Slobodzianek’s play affirms that speaking truth to power and exposing the dark deeds countries would cover up are more vital than ever.
The epic saga begins with the actors representing children in a classroom setting with open scripts as if they are doing a benign, removed play reading. Abram (Richard Topol) as the narrator and voice of love and unity announces “Lesson I.” Singing a childhood song signifying the opening day of classes, they innocently illuminate their aspirations, and we begin to understand how alike all human beings are with regard to childhood dreams. Of course, the foibles of human nature are also expressed, and throughout, the play touches upon areas in ourselves eliciting sympathy, revulsion, and a gambit of emotions.
After the first lesson, the actors step into history and become their characters in the second lesson, where Rysiek’s (Jose Espinosa) valentine for Dora (Gus Birney) is read aloud by rival Menachem (Andrey Burkovskiy). The classmates heartily join in imagining the pair’s marriage with a Jewish wedding ceremony, with all crying out congratulations, “Mazel tov.”
But however unified his classmates are in acting out the marriage, Rysiek, who is Catholic, feels humiliated. The Jewish Dora exclaims the line that we hear over and over in Our Class that clarifies the inability to stand up for and help one who is being victimized: “I felt bad for him, but what could I do?” That becomes the characters’ refrain while they watch their classmates being abused by the Poles in complicity with the Russians and Germans.
The playwright employs those words throughout to show how others accept and participate in the persecution of “the other” with silence. The silence and dismissal takes hold first in the hearts of individuals. It grows into a sickness in the society and culture, where fear removes human empathy and individual inaction creates a foundation for complicity and agreement in the face of violent acts of persecution.
The Third Lesson
As Abram announces the third lesson, Jakub Katz (Stephen Ochsner) defines a historical turning point in the history of the country in 1935 as “terrible” and life-changing. Marking the death of a historic personage in Polish history, Marshall Pilsudski, who is credited with being the Father of the Polish state, some in their class belittle him. Four Catholic classmates, Wladek (Ilia Volok), Heniek (Will Manning), Zygmunt (Elan Zafir), and Rysick mock and insult Pilsudski in a song referencing how the leader sold out the Poles to the Jews with his socialistic, inclusive, multi-ethnic and multi-religious policies.
As Jakub confronts Zyzmunt (Elan Zafir) about the insults and the counter-bullying, the Jewish Menachem (Andrey Burkovskiy) suggests they “teach him a lesson.” The peaceable Abram stops their quarreling and announces his goodbyes and intentions to stay in touch with his classmates and “beloved friends.”
Abram leaves his parents and extensive family in the village for an opportunity to live and study in the United States. From America, he announces the remaining lessons and appears live on video, reading his letters, to speak to his “beloved friends.” The play is structured around these letters, and the follow up interactions of his classmates, as one by one they either murder each other, die by their own hands, or die of the infirmities of old age.
With Abram’s removal to America, the playwright takes us through 11 more lessons to Abram’s final letter which sees him as an aged, hunched-over rabbi, detailing his life and the lives of his remaining three classmates as he lifts up the importance of his faith. However, it is with “Lesson Four,” after the death of Marshal Pilsudski, that political and religious divisions take over and the village devolves into hatreds and disunity among the classmates who Abram once valued as friends.
A key point that the playwright underscores and the director elucidates perfectly is that for the first year-and-a-half of the Second World War, the Soviet Union’s communists and the Third Reich’s fascists were allies in their castration of Poland. And after the Nazi occupation, Germany aligned Jews and communism, making both an anathema, which further frayed the solidarity that had once existed between the Poles and the Jews. Such a situation is ripe for Nazi anti-Semitism to take hold and flourish. Where once Poland had Europe’s biggest population of Jews, who lived in relatively amicable circumstances, the country now became a Jewish extermination factory, and the Nazis cultivated Polish complicity through their ever-increasing propaganda and bullying violence.
Golyak keeps his vision for Our Class highly stylized and metaphoric. Objects stand for concepts and processes. In one sequence, Dora and others draw faces on white balloons weighted at the end of ribbons to signify people’s souls. Then Dora cuts the ribbons that hold down the balloons to set them free, representing individuals’ deaths, including her own. Classmates come back after they’ve died, revealing how they haunt those who killed, tortured, and raped them. The time sequences are specifically noted on the chalkboard at the back wall of the stage, yet time and space are fluid. The effect illuminates the powerful ties between classmates who live on in the memories of those who killed them, as they become part of the historical record and live on in nightmares, film documentaries, and books.
Abram’s 14 lessons are enacted by the classmates who activate and explicate their themes as Golyak integrates the dialogue with superlative, inventive staging. This dramatic theatricality takes the audience through the events cleverly and diffuses the impact of the brutal violence, making it more powerful through metaphor.
Aided by choreographer Or Schraiber, Jan Pappelbaum’s scenic design, Andreea Mincic’s chalk drawing design, and Leana Gardella’s “intimacy and violence” guidance, the horror is suggested but not gratuitously overt. The effect is one of shock, numbness, and disbelief, as the word descriptions cohere and further illuminate the stylized visualizations.
Golyak’s perspective, relayed with the help of these creative artists and others (Adam Silverman’s lighting design, Ben Williams’ sound design, Sasha Ageva’s costume design, and Anna Drubich as composer) is clear. We cannot turn our eyes away for the first act of Our Class. The director has made excellent use of the dynamics of CSC’s space and structure as the audience surrounds the players on three sides. That leaves the backstage walls to be used for a myriad of creative enactments. One wall is a classroom chalkboard upon which the characters illustrate the lessons.
These writings include listings of names; portents like the small swastika drawn at the top of the board during the Russian occupation, and dates for the periods during which various events occur. Also, the chalkboard serves as a place where Eric Dunlap ad Igor Golyak present their projections and video designs. Sometimes clouds move across, revealing the passage of time or serving as a dire warning of impending doom. The use of the chalkboard as the characters write key elements of their lives on it is rich with illustrative meaning.
Anticlimax
However, the second act becomes anticlimactic and perhaps might have been pared down to enhance the theme that justice, one way or another, arrives at the doorsteps of the complicit classmates who killed, resisted, did take action, or hid and dismissed the circumstances. For example, Zocha (Tess Goldwyn) refused to save Dora’s child out of self-interest. For those who compromised their religious identity to save themselves, like Rachelka-Marianna (Alexandra Silber), there is a sense of loss and purposelessness, like being alive but dead.
Only Abram escapes the misery and torment of his friends and, for most of the play, is kept in blissful ignorance – until Zygmunt tells him how the Nazis killed the Jews of the village, which included most of his relatives. However, when he finds out from Zocha, whom he helps and brings to America, that the Jews were killed by their fellow countrymen, Abram provokes the government after the war to conduct an investigation, which results in prison sentences and an award for Wladek who testifies against classmates Zygmunt and Heniek and later is declared “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving Rachelka, who converts to Catholicism.
Our Class thematically has many more lessons than the ones Abram presents. The tapestry of meanings are vibrant and colorfully profound. The cast is uniformly excellent, though at times actors needed to project and enunciate clearly. In its transfer from BAM the production retains its exceptionalism and resonating power for us today. For tickets go to the Classic State website.
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