There aren’t words for what this role, play, group of creatives, and telling a story like this at this moment in history has meant to me as an actor, a Jewish woman and a human being.
As an actor, I don't know that there has ever been a greater ask of me: the challenge and privilege to play a single human being from the age of 5 to the age of 83 across the spectrum of her entire (incomprehensible) lifetime. I love "little Rachelka" as much as I love "old Marianna," and I marvel at the twists, turns, glories, broken dreams, acts of unimaginable violence, and spine-breaking moral quandaries this one woman faced from 1919 to 2002.
It was an honor to portray so complex a woman. It was a great exercise in the role of an actor to not judge their character, but to breathe life into them, animate their body, give voice to their words, and very simply: to portray them.
Rachelka/Marianna taught be so much about the arrogance of a 21st-century American sensibility: who are any of us to judge human beings in circumstances we will likely never experience? Who are we to be arrogant enough to presume we would know what is "best?" Or what we believe we would do if presented with identical circumstances? The truth is: no one knows what they would choose, or who they might be when squeezed beyond our imaginations.
*
We live in a time when the hate many people hold within themselves has
been given "permission" to be released into the world without consequence. I never felt particularly like a "Jewish actor' before the last 8 years— perhaps I identified more as "an actor who happened to be Jewish." I'm not certain.
But what I do know, is that as hatred perpetuates, so does the muscularity of my Jewish pride, onstage and off; and an extension of that is the calling to do plays that speak to these themes. To have audiences know these people I portray— and those they represent.
It is a Jewish belief that souls are with us as long as they are remembered; specifically remembered by name (one of the many reasons we name our children after the departed, and why we speak the names of the departed aloud so often). Audiences might not know Rachelka and those like her without plays like Our Class and actors like myself to bring them to life.
It feels like a very real mitzvah to tell
these stories.
I think with difficult material there is a
tendency to indicate to the audience that you must watch with great
seriousness. But that actually [prevents you from] entering into the
space with the same open heart that we hopefully walk through life with.
What Igor captures so beautifully is that difficult things happen
alongside joy. Through all the seriousness, there's love and humor and
ribbing each other. If we don't laugh and love, we're not honoring the
people in these stories. I don't
think Americans fully grasp that everywhere else on Earth, Judaism is
not merely a religion. It is also an enth-religion, a culture, and in many parts of the
world, it is related to blood: to racial identity, for better and for worse. I'm a
"successful" American assimilation story on some levels. My ancestors
were able to shed all of the accouterments of their visible Jewishness
and become Americans.
Perhaps that robbed me of countless Shabbats and Hanukkahs and prayers. But through my theatrical life, I
can reclaim sacred traditions. There's something about the theatre that
shares ritualistic sanctity with, in my experience, Jewish traditions.
Why is this night different from all other nights? Because tonight we're
doing the play. Rituals say that this moment is distinct and sacred
from the moment that comes before and the moment that comes after. And
what is theatre if not that?
Plays about the past can
make us very complacent as theatre-makers and as audiences. But this
isn't a play about the past at all. This is who we are.
The second act
of Our Class could almost be subtitled, "How they lived with
what they did." Some of them didn't do very well—even though they
survived, they were not fully alive.
One other thing that I've been
thinking about a lot is how, for a lot of the late 20th century and
early 21st century, art started to exclusively focus on victim stories.
Not that that isn't important. But by failing to focus on the
perpetrators, we fail to be exposed to how we might be like them. Both
these plays focus on the humanity and inhumanity of people just like us
who behave in monstrous ways. It's art's purpose to show us these
corners of humanity.
I think it's incredibly important, especially now,
to see that in "them" there's a whole lot of "us."
For now, all that’s left is chalk dust, memories, and gratitude.
Rachelka/Marianna taught be so much about the arrogance of a 21st-century American sensibility: who are any of us to judge human beings in circumstances we will likely never experience? Who are we to be arrogant enough to presume we would know what is "best?" Or what we believe we would do if presented with identical circumstances? The truth is: no one knows what they would choose, or who they might be when squeezed beyond our imaginations. 
Posts
