OUR CLASS
by Tadeusz Słobodzianek
Adapted by Norman Allen, from a translation by Catherine Grovesnor
Directed by Igor Golyak
An Arlekin Players Presentation
at Classic Stage Company
Play and Production Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Our Class is an unambiguously inventive evening or afternoon of theatre—but also very much an eye-of the-beholder one. An epic event, it tells the multiple and intertwining tales of a class of ten Polish high school students, both Jews and Gentiles, who graduate just prior to 1938—and the invasion of Poland by German forces and the Nazi regime…to which some of the students gravitated, making them persecutors of the others. The drama moves through the decades, following the trajectory of each life until its end…and the last survivor, just after the turn of the 21st century…the one who migrated to America before all the trouble began.
The inventiveness comes from director Igor Golyak’s use of a black box space—in which simple objects (a board, a ladder, a chair) can both function exactly as they are and stand in for other things (a bad, a car, a birds-eye view of the pavement); and in which anachronistic technology (e.g. a live video message transmitted via smartphone and projected on the back wall) is so smoothly integrated into the action that it becomes an aid to the verisimilitude of the era rather than a distraction; yet another engage-the-imagination leap into poetic representation from the opposite direction. And of course from having his uniformly excellent and fearless actors deliver character transition—age and psychology—almost entirely via persona, with only minimalist costuming. The entire back wall is a blackboard; and the narrative proceeds fluidly yet in demarcated “Lessons.” Over the course of the play’s nearly three-hour span (including intermission), there are fourteen of them. Mr. Golyak—working from a script almost bereft of stage directions altogether—also pulls off the neat trick of having dialogue that is mostly written in the form of narrative recollection seem like dialogue spoken with present-moment immediacy.
The eye-of-the-beholder aspect comes from your own background, connection to history and cultural experience. As dramatist Peter Stone noted about audience reaction, “Individually, everybody is wrong; collectively, everybody is right.” And there’s no question that the collective experience of Our Class—the audience’s collective engagement, their commitment to the experience and to the ensemble (not unlike the response elicited from the RSC’s fabled Nicholas Nickleby)—is one of having shared a long journey with friends; the ovation at the end is warm and cathartic.
But I’ve seen Our Class twice now—previously last season at BAM—and have three different responses to report: My recent companion, a senior citizen Jewish woman, politically liberal, was quite moved. My companion last season, an older-middle-aged woman, politically more conservative, bailed at intermission. I’m a 70-year old Jewish male, unabashedly liberal, but old enough to have experienced many, many dramas about the pernicious nature of political violence; and a good deal of them in my youth, by dramatists writing in the wake of WWII; in the 20-year period when the ravages of the Nazi regime were still very fresh echoes. And in Our Class, Polish dramatist Tadeusz Słobodzianek (via an English adaptation by Norman Allen—not to be confused with the Canadian author of the same name—working from a literal translation by Catherine Grovesnor) is covering ground familiar to me. The messages are not new—much as I endorse them—and it’s rare for me to perceive them in a theatrical/dramatic/narrative context as I did when I was much younger; through the less seasoned filter of discovery and revelation; with the sponge-like absorption of classic dialogue that hits and stays, having the earwig insistence of great melody. Which is not to say ho-hum; Mr. Słobodzianek is a major force in Polish theatre, writing not only to resonate with those who share his sense of heritage…but he’s a younger (if no longer young) voice, addressing younger generations. I often look askance at new works that have no idea how “old” they really are…
…but in the case of a play like Our Class, the object lessons and warnings it communicates, I must bow to exceptional circumstances; and in newly troubling times.
Sometimes it’s necessary to re-invent the wheel…