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OUR CLASS, the award-winning play by Polish writer Tadeusz Słobodzianek, will be performed for the first time in New York at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) from January 12-February 4, 2024, as was announced today by MART Foundation and Arlekin Players Theatre. OUR CLASS is adapted by Norman Allen and directed by Igor Golyak (The Orchard; State vs. Natasha Banina). Opening night is set for January 18.
OUR CLASS received the 2010 NIKE Literary Prize and has had productions throughout the world since its premiere at the National Theatre in London in 2009. The play follows ten Polish classmates, five Jewish and five Catholic, growing up as playmates, friends, and neighbors, who then turn on one another with life and death consequences. Inspired by real life events surrounding a horrific 1941 pogrom in the small village of Jedwabne, the play follows their lives from childhood through eight decades of upheaval.
Of the National Theatre premiere production, The Guardian said, “What the play proves, with unsensational dignity, is that, as one of the characters says, ‘you can never bury the truth,’” while The Financial Times cheered, “A very powerful work. The strength of the play is in its characterization. By unpicking the circumstances and not demonizing the perpetrators, Słobodzianek considers how ordinary people could end up involved in such atrocities.”
The cast includes Andrey Burkovskiy (Milk), Jack DiFalco (Torch Song), José Espinosa (Take Me Out), Tess Goldwyn (New Amsterdam), Will Manning (As Reaper in the Summer Gain), Stephen Ochsner (Chicks), Alexandra Silber (Fiddler on the Roof), and Richard Topol (Indecent; The Normal Heart), with two additional roles still to be announced. The actors take on the roles of their characters starting as school children and following them throughout their lives.
Directed by Golyak and adapted by Allen, OUR CLASS features scenic design by Jan Pappelbaum of the Schaubheune, music by Oscar® winner Anna Drubich (Navalny), and projections design by Eric Dunlap. MART Foundation’s Sofia Kapkova and Arlekin’s Sara Stackhouse serve as executive producers.
For director Igor Golyak, who most recently conceived and directed the 2022 production The Orchard with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht, OUR CLASS is personal and timely. Born in Ukraine, he came to the US as a refugee escaping persecution when he was 11 years old.
“OUR CLASS is based on the true story of the 1941 program in the small Polish village of Jedwabne, where 1600 Jews were murdered, not by Nazis as earlier reported, but by citizens of the town – their neighbors,” says Golyak. “Right now, Ukraine is faced daily with strikes and atrocities propagated by those who are their neighbors and relatives in Russia. And history has confirmed that Ukrainians collaborated as police in the massacre in Babi-Yar, Kyiv, where my grandmother’s family and over 33,000 other Jews were exterminated, also in 1941. These irreconcilable stories collide within me. OUR CLASSilluminates a truth that is hard to accept — that evil can live within us and next to us unexpectedly, and is part of our human nature. With this production, we are trying to untangle these traumas and pain points, to make sense of them. It’s an exploration of humanity, an effort to comprehend what we might do, who we might be in the face of future aggression, and how we might heal or at least live together with some meaning.”
In preparation, the OUR CLASS creative team traveled to Poland in July to visit the town of Jedwabne, meet with the playwright, visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, undertake research, and work creatively on the production.
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