Theater review by Raven Snook
Most plays about the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust feature nameless Nazis as the villains. But Our Class, an epic history-based drama by Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek, is about the familiarity of evil. Ten classmates in a rural Polish town—five Catholic, five Jewish—grow up bantering and bickering, flirting and fighting, in the 1920s and 1930s. There's an undercurrent of antisemitism, but also genuine camaraderie. The upheaval caused by the invasions of the Soviets and the Germans, however, frays their bonds and sets the stage for a ghastly 1941 pogrom, when the Catholics annihilate the majority of the community's Jews—but not before some of these lifelong friends rape and beat others to death.
Igor Golyak, an adventurous director known for his high-tech take on The Cherry Orchard a few seasons back, employs minimalism for maximum impact. A chalkboard backdrop ominously displays the characters' names, birth and death dates. A Jewish couple begs for help through the grate of the catwalk. The actors draw childlike faces on balloons that stand in for victims of genocide. Abram (an empathetic Richard Topol), a Jewish classmate who moves to the US before the chaos of World War II, stays in touch with them via video messages—an anachronistic touch that helps connect the action to today’s world.
Our Class | Photograph: Pavel Antonov
A virtuosic international ensemble keeps this harrowing material from becoming too much, demanding that audiences lean in, not tune out. All of the stories are compelling; especially haunting are the devastating demise of new mother Dora (a heartrending Gus Birney) and the forced conversion and marriage of Rachelka (a breathtaking Alexandra Silber) to big galoot Władek (Ilia Volok, excellent).
Słobodzianek's script, in a new English adaptation by Norman Allen, covers more than 80 years and is frequently delivered in direct address, so it's inevitably episodic—especially the second act, when we learn the fate of each survivor and perpetrator. And there are some curious directorial choices: Each act begins as a reading (a distancing tactic?), and the Ivo van Hove–style videos feel like an overused trick. But these missteps don't diminish the work's depressing timeliness. Decades after the massacre depicted in Our Class, we still have too much to learn.
Our Class. BAM Fisher (Off Broadway). By Tadeusz Słobodzianek. Dir. Igor Golyak. With ensemble cast. Running time: 3hrs. One intermission.
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Our Class | Photograph: Pavel Antonov