Stephen Ochsner in Z Space and Arlekin’s “Our Class.”
Pavel Antonov/Z Space and Arlekin
There’s no single moment when everything changes — not when the Soviets march in, not when the Nazis take over, not the first time one child taunts another.
Retrace the steps of 10 Polish students through “Our Class,” and the gentiles never sit down and decide, per se, to beat, rat on or kill their Jewish peers. At the same time, the schoolchildren in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s decades-spanning drama begin by playing soccer, singing classroom songs, pursuing crushes and staging pretend marriage rituals together.
“Our Class”: Written by Tadeusz Słobodzianek. Adapted by Norman Allen. Directed by Igor Golyak. Through April 5. Three hours, 10 minutes. $67.38-$146.13. Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. 415-626-0453. www.zspace.org
So there must be some inflection point — right? Something that explains how childhood friends could one day find themselves on opposite sides of an interrogation desk or the barrel of a gun?
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The brilliance of the 2008 play, whose Arlekin and Z Space co-production I saw Sunday, March 29, is how, when the mauling, raping, incinerating, hiding and torturing happen, it feels gradual and sudden at the same time. It’s like a slide the characters were always on without realizing it.
The way to make audiences truly feel historical atrocities they think they already know is with novelistic specificity and detail, and Słobodzianek’s play, which is based on a real 1941 pogrom, abounds with such riches.
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We learn how, after the double-rape of Dora (Gigi Watson), her infant isn’t just unharmed in the next room but gurgling happily, as if nothing happened. Or how, when Rachelka (Chulpan Khamatova) converts, marries and changes her name to save her life, her new mother-in-law cooked a marriage feast but never said one word to her new family member.
The superb cast members, under the direction of Igor Golyak, inhabit their roles with lived-in, deeply-etched assurance. Watch as Deborah Martin as Zocha gets rejected at a dance in her youth. She sits off to the side, periodically forcing her cheeks upward in a fluttery smile. But then she turns away from the crowd, and her expression collapses. It’s a whole arc of longing, and it plays out as a silent movie in a cineplex; follow any other character, and it’s like ducking into a whole other screening room.
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Chupan Khamatova, center, in Z Space and Arlekin’s “Our Class.”
Pavel Antonov/Z Space and Arlekin
One of the most harrowing scenes in the whole show, which follows characters from cradle to grave over more than three hours, is Rachelka’s wedding, which resembles a dance of death. Khamatova drains the life out of her countenance. She’s a ghost. When she realizes that her wedding gifts are pillaged loot from other Jewish homes, including her own, she crumples like the linens she’s clutching, covering herself with it as if laying her own burial shroud.
One directorial choice after another is a marvel of imagination.
To suggest Jews getting packed into a barn, their gentile torturers sit on a balcony above the stage, legs dangling like idle children. One by one, they draw faces on white balloons that have small weights at the ends of their strings and toss them on the floor below, till the stage is a field of faces resembling Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Then, at the moment they’re killed — the ones on the edges by burning, the ones in the center by suffocation — Watson cuts their strings. It’s like a beheading, but then when the balloon heads sail to the ceiling, many pop like a gunshot.
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Jeff Adelberg’s masterful lighting design keeps the whole show shadowed by menace. It’s like wartime smoke is always overhead, the characters always in some expressionist nightmare. In one glorious moment, as goons come for Jakub Katz (Stephen Ochsner), a giant shaft of light from an opening door travels across the stage. Light alone has robbed him of his humanity.
Stephen Ochsner in Z Space and Arlekin’s “Our Class.”
Pavel Antonov/Z Space and Arlekin
Projections by Golyak and Eric Dunlap exude “How’d they do that?” wonder. A chalk outline of a cloud travels across the stage’s rear wall; then a movie plays inside it. As Rachelka, rechristened as Marianna, decides whether to stay with Władek (Ilia Volok) after the war, a constellation-like projection starts to spin. It’s a moment when those two bodies could keep orbiting together or rocket to separate planes.
Some moments call for a little more hand-holding: Why is it important to show all the kids doing calisthenics, or to devote a whole scene to the town getting a movie theater? And as the war survivors age and die, the predictability of waiting for another body’s decrepitude and death drags.
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But then, as Abram (Richard Topol), the one classmate who moved to America before the war, lists his countless descendants, a chilling contrast emerges. Here’s a man who created so much life. Back home is death and living death. In a final image, all the actors are schoolchildren playing soccer again — not unlike Abram’s great-grandchildren. How robbed they were. How like them we are.