off off broadway

Not For The Faint of Heart

Gary Lucas — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:36:16 +0000

Not For The Faint of Heart Gary Lucas October 1, 2024 - 10:36

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Gus Birney in Our Class

If you are in NYC or plan to visit soon, I urge you to witness a major theatrical event—the searing and profoundly memorable play Our Class, now playing at Classic Stage Company 136 East 13th Street through Nov. 3rd.

The pivotal moment of this in-your-face, sometimes shocking, and brutal tour de force is the massacre of pretty much the entire Jewish community of Jedwabne, Poland, in a horrific pogrom that took place on July 10th, 1941.

I am inextricably connected to this hideous event as all my Polish Jewish family on my mother's side, then living in Jedwabne, were rounded up by their Catholic Polish neighbors and locked in a wooden barn, and incinerated there.

This story was suppressed for years in Poland. Still, a few Jewish people who managed to escape the barn memorialized this tragedy in a Yizkor Book (Memory Book) published in Israel, which included the names of all the victims—including my mother's original family name of Piekarski, which chillingly is invoked in this play—and which preserved the memory of this shocking crime over the years among the relatives of the annihilated Jewish community scattered all over the world.

I first heard about Jedwabne in whispers from my mother after she read excerpts from the Anne Frank Diary in Life Magazine in August 1958, when it was published in the US.

When she finished reading excerpts to me and my siblings, I asked her:

"What happened to our relatives in Poland?"

"They were burned to death in a barn along with the entire Jewish community of Jedwabne."

Despite my young age, even I quickly did the math and was shocked to realize that this tragedy had taken place a mere 17 years ago—ONLY YESTERDAY—and I shuddered involuntarily.

It's all here in a tumultuous, nearly 3-hour play which, utilizing many avant-garde theatre techniques (projections, animations, mime, sound manipulation, interpolated fragments of Yiddish songs, and repeated breaking of the fourth wall), brings the sweeping panoply of 20th Century Polish history to life in this tale of a mixed elementary school class of Jewish and Catholic children—a class who despite their religious differences exhibit much innocent love towards each other in the first flush of youth—and how the boys and girls of the class are torn apart when History tramples over them in the form of militant Polish nationalism and the advent of two invading armies (Russian and German), which seeps away and rends the entire cultural, political, and moral landscape of their youth asunder.

Directed by Igor Golyak and written by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, this play caused a firestorm of controversy when it premiered in Warsaw in 2009. This was also the case with the publication eight years earlier of Polish historian Prof. Jan Gross's book Neighbors, about the Jedwabne pogrom, which blew the lid off the 60-year hushing-up of details of this atrocity in Poland.

The NYC production, which ran at BAM Fisher Theater in January of this year, boasts an excellent cast highlighted by Gus Birney (pictured above) and Richard Topol. It is not for the faint of heart. This passion play (!) will leave you shaken (and you don't have to be Jewish).

Coming as it does with alarming rising levels of anti-semitism in the world and the two-headed Dogs of War currently howling on the World-Historical stage, it could not be a more timely play. Attendance is mandatory!

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Painting by Cheyenne Schiavone for my song “Jedwabne"

ADDENDUM (24 October 2024):

Last night, after the performance of this amazing play, Scott Richman, director of the NY/NJ chapter of the ADL, led a panel discussion that included personal statements about Jedwabne from Scott, the Ukrainian director Igor Golyak, and three people who took part in the official apology ceremony in Jedwabne by invitation of the then Polish government. We three all made the journey to Jedwabne in July 2001 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of this hideous pogrom, and we three bonded there. Two of us are direct descendants of victims of the Jedwabne massacre.

Scott and Igor spoke first: Scott made a statement about distressing rising levels of anti-Semitism worldwide, and Igor discussed his own complicated relationship with the material and the current war between Ukraine and Russia (he has lived in both countries).

Next to speak was Rabbi Miller, the South African-born son-in-law of Rabbi Baker of Israel.

The late Rabbi Baker had meticulously collected eyewitness accounts of the Jedwabne massacre along with a list of all the Jews who perished in the barn that day. Rounding up, torturing, and then incinerating all the Jewish men, women, and children in the barn that day was just the beginning--followed by dismemberment with axes and shovels and burial in a mass grave. Rabbi Baker arranged to have his findings published in an official Yizkor Book (Memory Book) in Israel.

News of the publication of this Yizkor Book caused a stir in Poland, eventually leading Polish historian Prof. Jan Gross to thoroughly investigate the Jedwabne crime and publish his own findings in his book Neighbors, which on publication in Poland touched off a firestorm of controversy which is still raging there, including vehement denial by the powerful Catholic Church (several years ago the revisionist Polish government passed a law making it a crime to use the phrase "Polish Holocaust" in any context).

My old friend Ty Rogers was next up and spoke eloquently about his personal discovery and investigatory research into the crime of Jedwabne over many years. I made the final statement and related my own complicated relationship with Jedwabne, which I first learned about from my late mother at age 6.

I cannot stress it enough, Our Class is just phenomenal. There are 13 more performances at the Classic Stage Company CSC theatre on East 13th St, and you should really try to see them before they close in NYC. I brought my old friend Ken Hurwitz, who works for the Open Society Foundation, with me last night, and he was shaking his head in awe and admiration of the play's power at the close,

I've seen this play written by Tadeusz Słobodzianek three times now, and it never fails to draw me in—and to draw tears. It is so fresh and vital. And very, very intense. As mentioned, it's directed by Ukrainian wunderkind Igor Golyak and superbly acted by an ensemble who perform this nearly 3-hour play with ferocious energy and jeu d'esprit. This may well be the best acting currently on view in NYC. Special standout performances are by the luminous Gus Birney and the Class Teacher Richard Topol, but the whole ensemble is fantastic.

I was so honored to take part in the panel afterward last night.

Thank you to producer Sara Stackhouse and the Arlekin Players Theatre.

Above is the song I wrote about Jedwabne at Rabbi Baker's suggestion while we were there in July 2001. Recorded in NYC with Ernie Brooks, Jerry Harrison, Billy Ficca, Jason Candler, Jenni Muldaur, and Alva Rogers, it first appeared on my Gods and Monsters album The Ordeal of Civility, released on Knitting Factory Records. I've sung it at the annual Jewish Heritage Festival in Kazimierz Krakow and at Symphony Space here in NYC on a bill with the late Theodore Bikel and other great Jewish artists.

It's sad to say that this song may well have cost me shows in Poland currently.

But I will continue to perform my song and speak about what happened in Jedwabne to the end of my days.

For more info, please read my "Letter from Jedwabne," published in The Forward: https://forward.com/.../jedwabne-pogrom-poland-gary.../

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Theater in the Time of Covid

Leah Richards — Sat, 23 May 2020 23:26:22 +0000

Theater in the Time of Covid Leah Richards May 23, 2020 - 19:26

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The Misanthrope

Written by Molière; translated by Richard Wilbur

Directed by Lucie Tiberghien

Presented by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance

May 2-6, 2020 on Molière in the Park's YouTube Channel

It's not hard to imagine an anthology of plays written specifically for performance via Zoom or its equivalents coming out of the current pandemic. At the same time, however, we are seeing theater companies and organizations working to present traditional and classical works in new formats. One of these groups is Molière in the Park, which is dedicated to presenting free performances of the French playwright's corpus to audiences in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. On May 2, Molière in the Park presented a performance of The Misanthrope that was livestreamed via the group's YouTube channel and will be available for free through May 6. This production of the satirical comedy, which made its stage debut in 1666, assembled the cast (most of whom were in various parts of New York but some of whom logged in from as far away as Los Angeles and Perugia, Italy) via Zoom, making clever use of backgrounds and eyelines to create the illusion of the actors sharing a space in some scenes and to emphasize their isolation in others. The production also featured a live chat in the comments for those watching through a browser or the Youtube app (as opposed to casting the stream to a TV). The cast delivered a lively and funny performance, while almost exclusively seated and not necessarily able to see one another no less, and watching it live imparted some of that sense of community that live theater creates so well.

The misanthrope of the title is Alceste (Jared McNeill), a Timon of Athens type who professes a radical honesty and rails against what he perceives as the hypocrisy and degeneracy of his times. Célimène (Jennifer Mudge), despite her embrace of the mores and manners against which Alceste sets himself, is the object of his affections. His rivals in this include Oronte (Chris Henry Coffey), whose sonnet-writing skills Alceste insults after trying first (hypocritically?) to pillory the poem indirectly, leading Oronte to try to have him arrested. Célimène's own rivals in affection include the prudish Arsinoé (Heidi Armbruster) and Éliante (Kaliswa Brewster), for whom Alceste's friend Philinte (Postell Pringle) has feelings. The machinations among these would-be lovers, along with two additional marquises, played by Naomi Lorrain and Tamara Sevunts, furnish targets for Molière's social satire while propelling the plot towards a final set of choices that the central characters must make.

Each act is briefly introduced by Samira Wiley, who also has a small part in the play proper, and singer-songwriter Stew provides a musical interlude between Acts 3 and 4. The language of the play is rhyming couplets (in this, it is reminiscent of much English verse of the long 18th century), but this adaptation also introduces some nods to its setting in contemporary Brooklyn: in the opening of the play, for example, Alceste takes off his headphones when he says he will be deaf to Philinte; and references are made to marquises having "joined the call" and to waiting until someone's Uber arrives. Aside from allusions to the atypical performance method, the production made some good use of its possibilities, with, for instance, eye-catching visual design in Act 2 that complemented the color of something that each character onscreen was wearing with different bold white-and-single-color wallpaper in that character's background. Act 5 features the effective symbolism of one Zoom window at a time disappearing as characters find out exactly what Célimène really thinks of them, and an earlier moment when Alceste feels himself betrayed receives notable emphasis just by McNeill moving around within the frame. McNeill makes for a charmingly irascible Alceste among this strong cast, with other standout moments including Coffey's very funny extended lead-in to reading Oronte's sonnet out loud and Armbruster's comprehensively hilarious turn as Arsinoé.

Following a Zoom curtain call was a Q&A generated by the comments. Audience members asked about the interpretation of Alceste, how the streaming format affected different elements of the production (one person asked whether directing it was more like directing a film, but live TV might be a better comparison), and upcoming productions, which will include Tartuffe. It is interesting to think about how the challenges for the actors, such as a lack of physical interaction, reflect our own everyday difficulties right now (there have been multiple recent articles about the illusion of connection in virtual meetings, for example -- the difficulties of having only the appearance of eye contact and lacking the typically unnoticed physical cues and rhythms of in-person conversation). What's great about The Misanthrope, though, is that you won't be thinking about any of this for 90-plus minutes, so check it out before, like an in-person performance, it disappears forever. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler