Elan Zafir

Our Class

September 18, 2024

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. [more]

Our Class

January 26, 2024

Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s "Our Class" is epic in its storytelling and shocking in its specifics. At three hours, the play is never long or boring as every line of dialogue offers new details to be digested as ten lives are laid out for us. While rather busy Igor Golyak’s production is always illuminating, always compelling. The cast of ten mostly young actors, many unfamiliar to New York audiences, are always riveting as they tell their individual and intertwining stories. What may be most shocking is that in Jan Gross’ prose account in his 2001 book "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwadne, Poland" he reveals was that this is not the only Polish town in which these atrocities against the Jews took place. One realizes why the world premiere of "Our Class" took place in Great Britain and not Poland. [more]

The Winter’s Tale (Bedlam)

October 21, 2022

Many of Bedlam’s productions have used small casts with most of the actors playing more than one role. In the case of "The Winter’s Tale," not one of Shakespeare’s more often produced plays, the casting uses so few actors that the play becomes confusing and difficult to follow, and a great many characters and much dialogue has necessarily been cut. In one head-scratching scene, Elan Zafir is required to play King Polixenes and his son Prince Florizel at the same time. While the sets and costumes are modern, with the Shakespeare poetry sacrificed to sound like contemporary speech, the characters are still referred to as “King Leontes” and his wife “Queen Hermione.” As the setting by John McDermott looks like three rooms in a frat house, one wonders why the Royal Family of Sicilia would be living in such shabby quarters and continually guzzling beer in the palace. [more]