Review: Our Class, a Story of the Holocaust and Communist Poland, at Classic Stage Company

The first rehearsal of a play is typically marked with a reading of the script. It can be an opportunity for actors to try out big choices before an audience of their fellow thespians, or to simply read the text in their own voices before committing to anything. The stakes are low, but the energy is often crackling with electricity as members of the company try on a character for size and sniff one another out. It’s like the first day of school.

This may be why director Igor Golyak has envisioned the opening scenes of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class as a staged reading. This English-language production (adapted from the original Polish by Norman Allen) is from Arlekin Players Theatre and was a highlight of this year’s Under the Radar festival. It has been remounted at Classic Stage Company with the entire cast intact, delivering performances that are even richer and more uncomfortably human than I remember.

Scripts in hand, they introduce their characters, all young students in Eastern Poland in the 1930s. The atmosphere is light and convivial, funny faces and jokey asides taking the edge off this very serious Holocaust drama. A flirtatious glance between Gus Birney and José Espinosa seems to suggest the earliest spark of showmance.

“Father’s a merchant,” Birney reads as her character Dora, “I’m going to be a movie star.” Over the course of the next two hours and 50 minutes, we witness the gap between childhood fantasy and lived reality in 20^th-century Poland. The students (half of whom are Jewish, the other half Catholic) come of age with their country dominated by neighboring great powers: first Stalin’s Soviet Union, then Hitler’s Germany, and then the USSR again following World War II. The choices they make in response to these historical events, which often amount to a decision between “bad” and “worse,” determine the course of their lives. Their choices eventually become “frozen,” presented to the audience in Adam Silverman’s stark theatrical lighting, which replaces the noncommittal house lighting of the first scene.

We see the adventures of the “four musketeers” Zygmunt (Elan Zafir), Rysiek (Espinosa), Heniek (Will Manning), and Władek (Ilia Volok) — Catholic boys who stumble along the porous border between collaboration and resistance in response to the foreign occupation of their country.

In the case of Władek, that means forcibly converting and marrying Rachelka (Alexandra Silber), one of the few Jews to survive a pogrom that could only be Jedwabne. It saves her life in the most brutal way possible. Silber wears the plastered smile of a hostage, which eventually becomes a permanent fixture of her face as she passes into dotage. The spousal interplay between Volok and Silber, with plenty of authentic bickering and shushing, powerfully suggests that affection is not necessary for the long-term survival of a marriage, but trust is essential.

We see that in the breakdown of the relationship between Zocha (Tess Goldwyn) and Menachem (Andrey Burkovskiy), who find comfort in each other during the war, but take radically divergent paths afterward. Burkovskiy’s performance is particularly haunting as we see his eyes deaden over a lifetime of extreme violence and misfortune.

And then there’s Abram Piekarz (Richard Topol), a lucky duck who receives a ticket to New York shortly before the outbreak of war, and who makes a point to write home under his new American name, Abram Baker. To him, his classmates are still the bright-eyed youngsters he once knew, unstained by the barbarity of the following years. Topol’s entire body radiates hurt when Abram is disabused of this delusion, a pain perversely mixed with the relief of knowing that he escaped (I was honored to attend Our Class with a descendant of Yehuda Piekarz, who became Julius Baker after he left Jedwabne in the early ’30s and seems to be, along with his brother Jacob, the inspiration for Abram).

Excellent performances support Golyak’s vision, which employs household objects (folding ladders, a bedsheet, party balloons) to tell a story that leaps across decades and political regimes. Jan Pappelbaum’s set is a giant chalkboard, simultaneously reminding us of the schoolhouse that ties these characters together and the palimpsest of human society, as hammer and sickle is erased to make way for swastika. Projections (by Golyak and Eric Dunlap) brings these chalk drawing to life and tell the story of the rise of mass media. Sasha Ageeva’s costumes cleverly straddle the line between period and contemporary (Zafir’s denim jumpsuit suggests a Polish dockworker, but he could also be a Brooklyn hipster in working-class drag). Ben Williams’s sound design complements the staging, making the staged reading of atrocity seem much more real, while Anna Drubich’s spine-tingling original music summons the ghosts of the past.

Highly controversial in Poland for the way it disputes that country’s official mythology of the war (that Poles were purely victims of totalitarian atrocities and not, in some cases, active perpetrators), Our Class remains powerfully relevant two decades later — especially as some Americans develop a taste for historical revisionism.  Słobodzianek and Golyak remind us that these terrible things really did happen, and were carried out by real people, not cartoon villains.