Theater review by Stuart Miller… In 1941, Nazi invaders marched the 1,600 Jews of the Polish village of Jedwabne into a barn and set it ablaze. At least, that’s the story that Poles told themselves once the massacre finally came to light. Then research revealed that this inhumane act had actually been carried out by local Poles, forcing a reckoning about anti-Semitism there and forever changing the narrative.
But “Our Class,” which played at BAM earlier this year and is now back at CSC, widens its lens considerably beyond that one incident. It tells the life stories of ten classmates, five Jewish and five Catholic, all born right after World War I, from their school days through Soviet occupation, Nazi occupation and beyond, all the way to the 21st century.
All those characters and all those years and all those incidents are combined with lots and lots of ambitious directorial flourishes from Igor Golyak to create a sprawling three-hour play that is both deeply flawed and immensely powerful.
The cast is uniformly strong, although there are three standouts: Alexandra Silber as Rachelka, who is saved by her classmate, Wladek (Ilia Volok) but who must marry him and convert to Catholicism to survive; Elan Zafir as Zygmunt, who seems to shed any conscience, betraying his fellow Catholic Rysiek (Jose Espinosa) to the Soviets and reveling in the beatings, murders and rapes; and Andrey Burkovsky as Menachem, whose wife Dora (Gus Birney) and baby are murdered and who survives, hidden by his Catholic classmate Zocha (Tess Goldwyn), and who seeks vengeance on Zygmunt and others after the war.
It sometimes feels, though, like Slobodzianek crammed three plays into one: the changing dynamics between the classmates before the war; the war and the immediate aftermath when the Poles continued seeking to commit violence against the Jews; and the long term impact of those years on these characters. ‘
In the first act, watching the characters transform from (semi) innocent kids to rivals to enemies is haunting. The brutal and public murder of Jakub (Stephen Ochsner) at the hands of Zygmunt, Rysiek and the future priest Heniek (Will Manning) is wrenching. In Golyak’s imaginative staging, Jakub is standing up against the back wall within the chalk outline of a corpse as the attackers pummel the wall with soccer balls and bags filled with corn starch, then he ascends a ladder as if leaving his body as he tells us what it’s like to die.
The scenes of horror—the gang rape led by Rysiek on Dora (on whom he’d had a boyhood crush), Zocha submitting her body to Zygmunt to protect Menachem, and, of course, the burning of the town’s Jews in the barn— will linger in your memory, as will the wedding between Wladek and Rachelka, rechristened Marianna, where the gifts are candlesticks, trays and silver taken from the slaughtered Jews.
And yet, there’s so much action, jumping from one time period to the next and chaotic scenes shifting from school to a movie theater to the streets, in the first act that some of the nuances, especially the impact of the Soviet’s arrival gets diluted.
Unorthodox and unnecessary directing choices serve only to distance us from the play’s reality, like the opening scene played as a “reading,” with actors in modern clothes and on book still and asking for lines, or the distracting and meaningless use of video cameras used by Abram (Richard Topol) when he recites his letters from America to his classmates.
The first act’s frenetic action was easier to sort through digest at BAM, while the intimate scenes, especially at the start of the second act packed more punch in this space. But the second act remains far too long, a never-ending epilogue of what happened to each surviving character in the decades after the war. Much of that should be drastically cut to allow more time to dig deeper into the psychic wounds each character carried.
My son argued afterward that the memorable moments were too diluted by the long run time and these other issues to make it stand out from other Holocaust-related stories and worth recommending. By contrast, I felt that despite its numerous flaws, “Our Class” is a potent reminder of how easily hate, when nurtured and not squashed, can decimate civilized society. It’s a play about antisemitism and the Holocaust, to be sure, but its echoes can be heard in what happened in the Balkans or Rwanda in the 90s, or, ironically in Gaza today… and it’s a warning about what could happen here.
“Our Class” runs at Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, through November 3rd. It is presented by Mart Foundation and Arlekin Players Theatre. Run time is approximately three hours.
Photos: Jeremy Daniel
