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Video: The Company of OUR CLASS At Brooklyn Academy of Music Meets the Press!
May 16, 2024
Our Class, the contemporary, award-winning play by Tadeusz Slobodzianek and directed by Ukrainian-born, Jewish director Igor Golyak will see a completely new production and its New York premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) beginning January 12. The cast and creative team of the play met the press this week and BroadwayWorld correspondent Richard Ridge was on hand to chat with the cast! See video of our visit to the rehearsal room!
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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The critically acclaimed, award-winning play Our Class is making its New York premiere at BAM this winter
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from January 12th to February 4th. Let me drop by the rehearsal room to bring you a sneak peek
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and to meet the company. The play is about a group of classmates
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it's 10 classmates, five Poles and five Jews that live in 1920, they were born in 1920
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and the play starts around 1925, 1926, so they're like six years old, and it goes up to 2000
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so where some of them are 80, the ones that last that long, live that long
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And it's about a group of people that like each other, that our classmates spend their whole time together
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and then they turn on each other. The Soviets arriving, and then the Germans arriving
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and taking over Poland, and their whole community is being split, they turn on each other
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they end up murdering each other, and live with this pain throughout their lives
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There's this great philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, who talks about how if we don't plan for the catastrophe
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it will happen, so in order to prevent it from happening, there is a need for us to plan for it
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And a play like this brings up so many hard questions that I want to avoid in my daily life
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and in dealing with them, I find myself in a process of washing away my hate, my own hate
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and I think in that way, it's a very important play. Right, and we're living in really complicated times
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really dark, and angry, and hate-filled, but complicated times, and I think this play speaks
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to that, and tries to just slowly unravel the web to get back to the simple truths about humanity
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and the way we treat each other as human beings. And we all should ask this question
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where this line lies, how could it happen, why, is it some fault within us, or the circumstance
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or, so that's, I think, that's what's interesting and difficult, and at the same time
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I think for the audience, it's just my opinion, it's interesting to see that transition
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so if you play in a sort of, say, a bad guy, it's not just a bad cartoonish character
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but the complicated person, and the reasons behind that, so that's something to examine
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and we see that in the world, we see that now, I'm originally from Kiev, Ukraine
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and I see how the families, it's all mixed, my dad's Ukrainian, my mom's Russian
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and you see families, they don't talk to each other, they hate each other, so what's behind that
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I think what attracted me to the play is unlike a lot of plays
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about really difficult Jewish trauma, it really examines the question, what would I do
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and puts it to the audience, the play is told in direct address, so we're in direct communication with the audience
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which is very different for the role of the audience, they have to be an active participant
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versus just passively observing, and I think the other thing it does so beautifully
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is it really says, rather than going, they, capital T, they, did terrible things
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over there back then, it really demands the inner exploration of actors and audience alike going
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what would it actually take for me to behave this way under similar circumstances
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and take accountability for the fact that as a human animal, we're capable of great cruelty
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and of great kindness. This space has been a very safe space
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as it really, really needs to be, but it's also been very collaborative
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Everybody has a say, everybody's voice is heard during this process, and it shows on stage
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because everybody's got their own ideas and brings their selves a part of it, which is the whole concept of the show
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is to have us tell this story, and not just these people
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that other people don't recognize. Yeah, like, people, it's like molecules with the, like, inside of a hot air balloon
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they bump into each other, and create that heat to lift up the balloon
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That's what I love being part of, I love being one molecule that's just bumping into as many people as I can
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This play, well, this play is gonna upset some folks, it's an intense experience
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and Igor doesn't do not intense, and so they are gonna have to come be ready to be moved
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and I think it brings up, you know, the Jewish questions, the Polish questions
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it's an intense piece, and I think it'll give us all sort of a more historical grounding
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on what's going on right now, and like they say, it's the future, unfortunately
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So, I think it's gonna be part of the conversation that is happening now in the US
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around Gaza, around Jewishness, around October 7th, it's an important play
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