Inspired by real life events, Our Class delivers a highly artful history lesson on how crazy antisemitism can erupt during times of social and political conflict.
The rise of antisemitic troubles in today’s world lends punch to Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s drama and to director Igor Golyak’s production, which reopened tonight in the East Village following a well-received New York debut in the Under the Radar festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this year.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Mostly spanning the 1930s-1940s, Our Class interweaves terrible stories about friends and neighbors in a Polish village – ten chums since childhood, five Catholic and five Jewish, although none of them seem especially religious – who eventually and brutally turn on their adult classmates as World War II begins.
Wholesale massacre, selective murder and rape, and the wanton pillaging of possessions result, followed by decades of silence.
The most infamous historic event that the play dramatizes is that time in 1941 when many hundreds of Jewish villagers, mostly women and children, are locked inside a barn that is then set on fire. The atrocity was blamed on Nazi invaders, but many years later the perpetrators were revealed to be townspeople.
Adapted by Norman Allen, the two-act play is crafted as a mix of direct narration and dramatized confrontations or incidents. It initially is framed briefly as a play reading, with the actors in more or less modern dress and referring to scripts, but other than reappearing at the top of the second act, that concept goes away.
Golyak produces numerous tricks from his director’s hat to relieve the relentless nature of Slobodzianek’s overlong Holocaust tragedy as it unfolds over nearly three hours (including an intermission).
Golyak’s fluent staging mostly involves a classroom and playground that erodes into a dusty wasteland. At one critical point the actors draw faces upon a cluster of white balloons to represent souls soon sent up to heaven. Individuals climb elongated ladders to escape or to witness horrors. Integral to Golyak’s production is a huge chalkboard doorway/wall at the rear of the playing space, where names, dates and images are incessantly scribbled (and erased) by the performers and further animated by projected and even bits of live video.
Such theatrical devices can be distracting, but their distancing effect on viewers helps to make Our Class more of a thoughtful experience than simply an emotional cry-fest. The stagecraft necessary to realize such quasi-Brechtian doings is neatly provided by Golyak’s designers: Jan Pappelbaum (scenic), Sasha Ageeva (costume), Adam Silverman (lighting), Seth Reiser (revival lighting) and Ben Williams (sound).
Yet Our Class does not function as effectively as it might at the 199-seat Lynn F. Angelson Theater, where Classic Stage Company hosts this production by Arlekin Players Theatre, of which Golyak is artistic director.
The airy CSC space’s three-quarter audience configuration offers good sightlines, but hearing the dialogue can often be a challenge because the actors possess or assume central European accents, which adversely affects their diction in English. The writings and drawings scrawled by the actors across that vast chalkboard are scarcely discernable to much of the audience and register as mere busywork. A brief sequence when Richard Topol live videos himself walking from the stage into the lobby of the theater and outdoors may be cute but undermines the authenticity of the key individual he plays, who serves as the link for the stories.
Not incidentally, Topol’s cheerful intermittent appearances as a classmate who goes to America before the pogroms start and corresponds with his friends (those who survive, anyway) sharply contrasts with the misery everybody else suffers. Amidst this nightmare time, the saga of of an unlikely marriage of necessity between a smart Jewish woman and a stolid Polish guy – adeptly portrayed by Alexandra Silber and Ilia Volok — develops into a thread of touching humanity that brightens a mostly disconsolate, though worthy, drama.
The remaining members of the ensemble provide capable performances, which bodes promisingly for Golyak’s revival of The Merchant of Venice slated to be staged in November at CSC with most of the same company led by Richard Topol as Shylock.
Our Class opened September 17, 2024, at Classic Stage Company and runs through November 3. Tickets and information: ourclassplay.com
