It’s a hauntingly timeless tale: Ten classmates—five Jewish and five Catholic Poles—grow up as friends and neighbors, united in humanity, until hatred infects their lives. Inspired by real-life events surrounding a 1941 pogrom in a small Polish village, “Our Class” traces the group’s lives for eight decades, a retelling of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s 2008 original play.
Ukrainian-born Jewish director Igor Golyak oversees the production by his Arlekin Players, a local immigrant theater company; it opened to rave reviews in New York before preparing to debut at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion from June 13-22.
Golyak talked to JewishBoston about the upcoming production and its universal message.
Why bring this show to Boston?
Boston is my hometown, and it’s where Arlekin started. We started 15 years ago with refugees from the former Soviet Union. We now have a New York audience, but Boston is my main home.
Tell me about the actors.
In this show, there’s a Boston favorite, Deb Martin; we also have a well-known New York, Broadway actor Richard Topol. We also have international superstar Chulpan Khamatova, an A-list actress who left Russia.
What’s the significance of an immigrant theater company doing a show like this?
The significance is that immigrants or refugees have escaped from something; we have a different worldview. And being refugees and escaping from somewhere, we have a sense of potential danger, where American audience members who may have lived comfortable lives might not. In this play, an event like this could happen in the future. We are approaching it from that point of view. Hate and antisemitism lives and has lived since the beginning of time, and will continue to live, and it’s something that has to be acknowledged.
How does that knowledge inform the rehearsal process? Does the topic feel especially close to home?
Of course, it feels close to home. Actors don’t approach a script thinking, “Oh, we’re going to tell a story about the past, how evil people from somewhere over the ocean killed other people and they were bad,” versus saying, “No, this is people like us, right now, today, who have done something awful to their neighbors, killed them, burned them in a barn.” We’re saying: What if you knew this was going to happen in the future? What’s the urgency with which you approach this role? That influences how the actors work. An immigrant has to reinvent themselves, and that’s a big part of our values: reinvention. We’re not settling for things. We’re continually reinventing what theater can be.
Tell me a little bit about your own background.
I’m originally from Kiev, Ukraine. My parents were refugees, and we came when I was 11. My parents were Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union.
What do you think the Boston audience will take away from this particular play at this moment in time?
I think, after Oct. 7, it’s important for people to understand how easily hatred can escalate and become something that is life-changing for a community—how easily that can happen. What makes the play really interesting is the span of time where we follow 10 classmates, some of whom don’t survive, some of them dying in the barn, perpetrators that have committed these crimes and some of the survivors, and how they deal with the awful event throughout their lives.
How do you want people to feel when they leave?
It’s both very dark and very light. There’s a lot of humor, there’s a lot of lightness, there’s a lot of love, there’s romance. It’s very funny at times and very dark at times. It’s both.
How did your New York audiences respond?
Incredible. We just won four Lucille Lortel Awards. People didn’t want to leave the theater.
What else do you want JewishBoston’s audience in particular to know about this show?
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it. It’s so important that people from my hometown try to understand what we as immigrants and refugees want to share, and maybe get another perspective on what is happening—how fast and how quick it could happen, and also that there’s true humanity that exists, that we can turn to, and we have that choice. And this play provides these gray areas. It enlightens, it also provides so much hope, and it also is so dark at the same time.
Get tickets for the limited run of “Our Class” at Calderwood Pavilion from June 13-22.
