Our Class

Tweet

One of the worst aspects of growing older is losing our shock at humanity’s knack for cruelty. Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, adapted by Norman Allen, begins in that innocence, as we’re introduced to ten classmates, equally divided between Catholic and Jewish. It’s the interwar period, we’re in a Polish village, and immediately the audience knows this tiny place will not be spared what is coming, because the classmates’ lifespans are recorded in the program, with a few of them close to the end. The only real questions left are how the inevitable will take historical and theatrical shape.

Under Igor Golyak’s hyper-inventive direction the production’s form is masterfully daring, ignoring the barriers of past, present, and future, as well as performance and life. Golyak’s double disrespect for temporal and fourth-wall distancing is most evident in the actors’ frequently unsettling playfulness, including a foreboding sing-a-long with the audience during a pretend Jewish wedding. Smilingly staged by both Catholic and Jewish classmates when such interreligious bonhomie was still possible, the echoes of these characters’ younger, imaginative selves continue to linger as some of them mature into monsters, their brutality imbued with an anachronistic childlike quality that strengthens the devastating sense of a lost innocence.

As this site’s Editor-in-Chief Victor Gluck noted in his own review of Our Class in January, it’s the most produced Polish play outside of Poland, having premiered at London’s Royal National Theatre in 2009. Although there have been other U.S. mountings–Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.–its first New York appearance came earlier this year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with the Arlekin Players Theatre production, and its thankfully unchanged cast, recently trekking across the East River to the Classic Stage Company. It’s a shame for local theatergoers that the play’s arrival in the area took so long but great that the departure date isn’t here yet.

With the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom as its inspiration and pivot point, Our Class is structured as a series of fourteen deceptively chronological lessons that extend slightly into the current century, when the last classmate dies. Jan Pappelbaum’s beguiling set, a wall-sized blackboard supplemented by other surfaces the actors emotionally mark up with lots of chalk, also serves as a canvas for Eric Dunlap, Golyak and Andreea Mincic’s equally expressionistic projection and video design, obliquely contributing to the play’s prime educational objective: replacing patriotism and piety with culpability. That may be gradually occurring now, but, after another roughly eight decades, it’s anyone’s guess what will be remembered about Jedwabne, since time’s passage always carries with it the temptation to distort or forget, an artistic caveat that might as well be in the program, too.

As the classmates tell their stories, often directly to the audience, Słobodzianek and Golyak hold the guilty accountable for crimes they escaped through indifference, placing the blame on the Nazis, and mass murdering people who knew the truth. Following Słobodzianek’s dramatic lead, Golyak delicately depicts the horrors of Jedwabne with restrained and poetic ingenuity, but he has to accept one creative limitation shared by him and Słobodzianek: neither of them comprehend why Jedwabne happened. That’s because Golyak and Słobodzianek simply cannot penetrate the consciences of Rysiek (José Espinosa), Heniek (Will Manning), and Zygmunt (Elan Zafir) as they helped burn their former classmate Dora (Gus Birney) and her baby to death in a barn filled with other confined Jews, and they cannot come close to psychologically unpacking how those three young men could call themselves freedom fighters as they killed another classmate Jakub Katz (Stephen Ochsner), a Jewish Communist absolutely doomed by that fatal combination of religious identity and political affiliation. The preceding Soviet occupation might offer context, but it didn’t crack Jakub’s skull open.

The other Jewish classmates go on existing, but other than Abram (Richard Topol) who immigrates to America in 1937 and eventually becomes a rabbi, that doesn’t necessarily mean living. Dora’s husband Menachem (Andrey Burkovskiy) has a romantic relationship with a former classmate Zocha (Tess Goldwyn), a Catholic who protects him during the pogrom, but her love can’t save Menachem from the vengefulness devouring his soul. Meanwhile, Rachelka (Alexandra Silber), the last Jewish woman of Jedwabne, must sacrifice her own spiritual life to continue to have a corporeal one, a devil’s bargain that involves converting to Catholicism, being rechristened Marianna, and marrying Władek (Ilia Volok), a weak man who witnessed Dora and Jakub’s deaths but did nothing to stop either of them. Dying in 2002, Rachelka essentially suffers the play’s longest and slowest murder, as the final Jewish victim of Władek’s cowardice.

Despite all of these obvious reasons for despair, Słobodzianek and Golyak never succumb to it, adding humor throughout the play; they even, against the odds, manage to find laughs and a legitimate feeling of hope at its conclusion. But that isn’t enough for the open-hearted Golyak who turns the deceased Dora into an angel of death. In this benevolent guise, Dora becomes a comforting presence for the classmates who died after her, even the ones who caused so much suffering in Jedwabne, as if she can somehow see the sinner before the sin. For most of the audience, that will likely remain a lesson beyond this world, too.

Our Class (through November 3, 2024)

Mart Foundation and Arlekin Players Theatre

Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-677-4210 or visit http://www.classicstage.org

Running time: two hours and 50 minutes with one intermission