THEATRE REVIEW: OUR CLASS
8 APR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

The first scenes of Studio 180’s production of OUR CLASS, which opened Thursday on the Berkeley Street Theatre mainstage, are as pivotal as they are tough to stage, involving as they do adult actors portraying children. Not just any children, mind you, but a class of school children in a Polish town called Jedwabne, in the days before the Germans and the Russians turned the country into so much rope in an international tug-of-war.

In a reflection of the town they call home, the 10 children that comprise OUR CLASS are a mixed bag — male and female, bright and not so bright, ambitious and lazy and, finally, Jewish and Polish Catholic. As they learn their lessons and play at their innocent childish games, there is an awareness of the differences between them, but it is overshadowed by the commonality of the schoolyard life they share. Of course, that is all about to change as Jedwabne is invaded first by Stalin’s communists, and then by Hitler’s fascists. The things the classmates have in common are increasingly overshadowed by their differences, with tragic and horrific results.

Like a lot of towns throughout Europe during the Second World War, Jedwabne would be stripped of its Jewish population when Germany occupied it. But unlike most other towns, the gentile portion of the population didn’t wait for the Nazis to destroy their Jewish neighbours. Instead, they tackled their extermination with appalling efficiency.

It’s a grueling story, unflinchingly told, redeemed only slightly by the occasional touches of charity and humanity. Though classmates murdered classmates, others — a pitiful few — were hidden away by their friends, thus escaping the fate that claimed not only their school friends but their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles as well.

As horrific as it is, the brutal murder of Jedwabne’s Jews is only half the story that playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek and translator Ryan Craig attempt to tell in this, the work’s North American première, produced in association with Canadian Stage. Having dealt unflinchingly with the massacre of the Jewish population in their first act, they move on to examine how the perpetrators coped with life after their massacre. They also examine how the few Jewish survivors — one hidden by a classmate until he could flee the country, another converted to Catholicism and married to one of her classmates — dealt with survival in a world stripped of everything and everyone they had ever believed in, or loved.

Under the direction of Studio 180’s Joel Greenberg, a dedicated 10-member cast — David Beazely, Jonathan Goad, Jessica Greenberg, Ryan Hollyman, Mark McGrinder, Kimwun Perehinec, Alex Poch-Goldin, Dylan Roberts, Michael Rubenfeld and Amy Rutherford — tackles the story with unflinching courage, but uneven skill. In the process, they create a time capsule that is disturbingly true to life. There is also a lovely simplicity to John Thompson’s set and costumes, underscored by Kimberly Purtell’s lighting and Michael Laird’s sound designs, that conspires to serve the story well.

But theatre — great theatre of the kind this aspires to be — should offer more than a riveting reflection of life and death. In that arena, this falls a little short. Had Greenberg and his cast successfully imprinted the innocence of those opening scenes on the collective consciousness of their audience — and effectively evoked that innocence in the final choral scene, thereby closing the dramatic circle of the work — OUR CLASS would have been more than a worthy history lesson. It would have been a cautionary tale for all time. That, one suspects, is what the playwright intended.