TDF Stages

The urgency of Arlekin Players' back-to-back productions of 'Our Class' and 'The Merchant of Venice'

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At a moment when reports of anti-Jewish incidents are at an all-time high, Richard Topol says it's "a mitzvah" to be performing in two shows back-to-back that explore the scourge of anti-Semitism. The first is Our Class by Tadeusz Słobodzianek, a harrowing, history-inspired epic that chronicles the lives of ten 20th-century Polish classmates—five Jewish, five Catholic—who not only grow up and grow apart, but also turn on each other violently. The second is Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, long considered problematic because of its villainous depiction of the moneylender Shylock. Both plays explore what happens when traumatized people lash out at those who are scapegoated and othered by their community. That's why director Igor Golyak, an immigrant from Ukraine, paired them for his Boston-based Arlekin Players Theatre's residency at Classic Stage Company (CSC) this fall.

Playing through November 3, Our Class is a remounting of his company's acclaimed production, which ran at BAM earlier this year with the same cast, including Broadway vets Richard Topol and Alexandra Silber. Running November 22 to December 22, The Merchant of Venice is a new project that features many of the same actors, including Topol as Shylock and Silber as Portia.

These shows are very personal for Golyak, Topol and Silber, who are all Jewish. Topol and Silber even hear echoes of their own histories in their roles. In Our Class, Silber's character Rachelka escapes a pogrom and is forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism. As the child of one Jewish parent and one Catholic, she says performing in these plays feels like a "reclamation" of her heritage. And Topol identifies with his Our Class character Abram, who emigrates from Eastern Europe before the Holocaust and builds a new life in America, just as the actor's family did.

TDF Stages spoke with Golyak, Silber and Topol about working on these challenging plays, embracing their Jewish identity and how we are all, under the right circumstances, capable of inhumanity.

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Sarah Rebell: How do you feel about returning to Our Class, which is such a powerful and poignant show? Did you learn anything from the first run that you hope to bring to this return engagement?

Alexandra Silber: I'll just start with some humor and say, "Can you imagine if we hadn't learned anything?"

Richard Topol: I'm excited for this new space. The BAM space was great, but there were people who were far away. The CSC space is so intimate.

Igor Golyak: The set looks like it belongs here. It's such a beautiful playground.

Silber: A proscenium stage [like the one at BAM] actually plays against what [playwright] Tadeusz Słobodzianek and Igor are trying to create. They want to make sure that the audience can't just be passive observers. With a thrust stage [like the one at CSC], the audience is able to watch other audience members watching the show, which creates an additional metatheatrical element.

Rebell: Three weeks after Our Class closes, you will open The Merchant of Venice at the same theatre with many of the same collaborators. How are you preparing to do two such intense plays in a row?

Topol: We live in a time when the hate that a lot of people hold in them has been given permission to be released into the world. As a Jew, doing plays that speak to these themes, I feel like it's a mitzvah to tell these stories. I've been working on Shylock for years. It's disturbing and it challenges me. As an actor, knowing that what I'm doing is, in its way, a mitzvah makes it easier for me to know that I'm spending the next four months in these two different versions of a hellhole.

Silber: I'm completely with you, Rich. I've done Portia before, but I have never done Portia with Rachelka's story preceding it. There's something important about it feeling like one continuous soul telling these two stories.

Rebell: Some consider Merchant anti-Semitic due to its depiction of Shylock. Did that concern you?

Topol: Igor's way into Merchant is so exciting and like nothing I would have ever imagined. It's going to be crazily fun and a roller coaster ride. I'll just say this: There are puppets!

Silber: 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.

Golyak: I absolutely agree with Al, that seriousness gives us an easy way out. It makes us separate ourselves from what's happening on stage. The closer the audience feels to the characters, the greater the chance they can imagine that we are in the same boat.

Rebell: One takeaway I had from Our Class is how terrible events can be excused, rationalized or disowned by entire communities. That's part of how anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred are perpetuated.

Topol: One of the great things about Tadeusz's script is how we follow the journey of people's PTSD, the way they deny their experience or the way they come to accept it and move past it. In Abram's case, he is shocked that the world is unfathomable. But then he sort of forgives one of the guys who clearly participated in murdering one of their classmates, one of his friends.

Silber: These are plays about the past. That 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."

Golyak: Sometimes we make choices that we don't understand. And who's to say that the choices we're making right now are the right ones? I don't know that. Shakespeare didn't know that. Shakespeare lived in an anti-Semitic environment… there were no Jews in England, actually. So, it wasn't anti-Semitic because for anti-Semitic, you need Jews. It was just hatred. At the same time, Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta. I actually incorporate some lines from that play [said by Barabas, a wealthy Jewish merchant in Malta]: "I walk abroad a-nights and kill sick people groaning under walls. Sometimes I go about and poison wells." That's the environment that Merchant was written in.

Silber: It's like Marlowe's Pizzagate. You just go, "What? Where does this come from?" And yet, it was so emotionally true for those people.

Rebell: Your Jewishness is important to all of you and is intertwined with your work and lives. Igor, last year you told The Forward about your interest in Jewish displacement stories. And Al, you've spoken about having your bat mitzvah at age 36. Has working on Our Class and Merchant at this fraught time given you new insights into your identity?

Topol: My family's story is a Fiddler on the Roof story. They were driven out of what is now Ukraine and some of them were killed. The ones I know made it to America, just like Abram does in Our Class. So, with Our Class, I feel like I'm telling my family's story. The role that I get to play connects me to that electrically and fills my heart, which is why my monologue at the end is so powerful. It means so much to me to know that we have survived and we will go on.

Golyak: The more anti-Semitism exists, the more Jewish I feel. When I was in Poland doing research for Our Class, a tour guide explained how in the 14th century, there was a king named Casimir, who called the Jews to come from other parts of Europe where they were very much persecuted. He even gave them some presence in the government—they couldn't vote, but they had some sort of representation. For 700 years, Jews thought that Poland was the place to be. They thought they were accepted. And then 95% of them were exterminated. So, what is the next story?

Silber: Igor can really speak to this, but I don't think Americans fully grasp that everywhere else on Earth, Judaism is not just a religion. It is also a culture, and in many parts of the world, it is related 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. Maybe that robbed me of certain Shabbats and certain Hanukkahs and certain 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?

Rebell: Arlekin Players Theatre has worked with many artists who are Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union. And the company has been involved in art therapy initiatives to support people who have been impacted by the current war in Ukraine. How do you see the role of art in times of conflict?

Golyak: I'm not really a message person. I'm more of a question person, I guess. But you know what? At BAM, we always had problems with the audience not leaving the theatre. They would just sit. There's a sense of connection that they felt with each other, a sense of common empathy. Not that, "Oh my god, the world is awful," but a sense of, "Somebody else feels like I do." That is what I hope to do. And you never know when this will happen. But when it does, it's like a spark from heaven and I think it's really meaningful.

Topol: Maybe you don't think of yourself as somebody who carries a message. That's why you have a theatre company to tell stories. But I think actually what you just said is what your message is. To me, the thing that you do as a theatre-maker is that you try to get people to find their way to their humanity and to everyone else's humanity. That's the magic that you try to make.

Silber: I often say that art is a service industry. There's a Yiddish phrase I love, zeyn in dinst fun, which means to be in service of. Being in service of and repairing the world is one of our basic precepts. And I think it's a theatrical form of never forgetting. As artists, that storytelling is how we never forget and turn it into meaningful action.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for Our Class. Go here to browse our latest discounts for dance, theatre and concerts.

Our Class is also occasionally available at our TKTS Discount Booths.