But for those of us who are atheists, death is simply a given: the end of the life process and the last breath in what has hopefully been time well spent. Although many have tried to avoid death, no one has ever beaten the odds. Perhaps that's why, as a life-long atheist, I don't think I've ever been afraid of death. Referencing the basic questions of journalism (Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?), it has never been a question of "if."
For most people, death is a random affair. It may take place during a natural disaster, an accident, a school shooting, or mark the moment when someone succumbs to a fatal disease. But there are plenty of cases in which someone's death is either willful or pre-ordained. Whether a person commits suicide or dies in front of a firing squad, he may be acutely aware that his time is up.
In certain instances, death is pathologically linked to discrimination. In addition to a long history of religious violence, some societies have achieved infamy as a result of genocides inflicted on racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities (when the bodies were counted, it quickly became apparent that death didn't just come for the archbishop).
Two recent dramas took unique approaches to dealing with death. One is based on a 500-year-old morality play that shows how everyone has equal appeal to Death. The other is based on a gruesome historic event during World War II in which, fearing the worst, a group of Jews meticulously prepared for the inevitable.
* * * * * * * * *
In November 1940, shortly after the Nazis confined nearly half a million Jews to the Warsaw Ghetto, a small but dedicated group decided to document Nazi atrocities with eyewitness accounts and send their reports of Hitler's mass murder to London through the Polish underground.The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival recently presented the world premiere of a heart-rending docudrama entitled Who Will Write Our History. Written, directed and produced by Roberta Grossman, the 90-minute film tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. In her director’s statement, Grossman writes:
“Created and led by Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the Oyneg Shabes was an organization of 60+ members engaged in spiritual resistance against the Nazis, fighting hatred, lies, and propaganda with pen and paper. They wrote and commissioned diaries, essays, jokes, poems, and songs. They also collected artifacts such as photographs, German pronouncements, labels on Ghetto goods, official and underground newspapers and more -- anything that would help future historians tell the story of the Ghetto from the Jewish point of view, not from the Nazi perspective. On the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Oyneg Shabes members buried 60,000 pages of documentation in the ground in the hopes that the archive would survive, even if they did not, to 'scream the truth to the world.'”
 |
| Poster art for Who Will Write Our History |
“Historians concur that the Oyneg Shabes Archive is the richest cache of eyewitness, contemporaneous accounts to survive the Holocaust. In 1999, three document collections from Poland were included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register: the masterpieces of Chopin, the scientific works of Copernicus, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Despite its importance, the archive remains largely unknown outside academic circles. The moment I found out about this secret band of journalists, scholars, and historians, I knew I had to make a film about them. Their story, captured in Who Will Write Our History is, in my opinion, the most important unknown story of the Holocaust.”
The premiere of Grossman's docudrama comes at an important cultural moment. Many Americans are feeling spiritually drained and mentally exhausted from trying to cope with one Trumpian scandal after another. Add in all the conspiracy theories being flogged by conservatives and it can become difficult to find the truth. Even when the truth is staring you in the face, how do you share it with others? How does a filmmaker bring the story of the Oyneg Shabes Archive to life for contemporary (as well as non-Jewish) audiences? As Grossman explains:
“In order to ground the film’s cinematically dramatized scenes in historical accuracy, the production design team worked with scholars for six months before we started filming. This process ensured that every pen, shoelace, and wall color was spot-on for the period. The words spoken by actors in the film come directly from the writing of the Oyneg Shabes Archive and/or, in the case of the film’s narrator, Rachel Auerbach, from her post-war writing. As with the historical people they portray, the actors switch freely from speaking Yiddish to Polish in the film.”
 |
| Poster art for Who Will Write Our History |
“Who Will Write Our History tells the story of a place that no longer exists (the Warsaw Ghetto), about people who are long dead, and about a period of history captured primarily in black-and-white film and mostly by Nazi propaganda photographers and cameramen. While striving to avoid ‘tricks’ that would ‘fool’ an audience, the film does employ transparent visual effects such as compositing actors shot against green screen with archival footage. The goal here is to bring the past to life while balancing against the high standards for veracity in a documentary. To achieve this goal, we blended archival and dramatic footage, pulling from the tools of dramatic feature storytelling. I want people not simply to learn from the film, but to be engaged and deeply moved.”
 |
| A scene from Who Will Write Our History |
Most Polish Jews were executed in 1942. Only three members of the Oyneg Shabes project survived World War II. Of those three, only one knew that the archives had been buried under the ruins of a former Yiddish school.
- On September 18, 1946, searchers found the first of 10 tin boxes (containing documents from 1940-1942) that had been buried in 1942.
- In December of 1950, Polish construction workers erecting new apartments discovered two aluminum milk cans containing documents from August 1942 to February 1943.
- A third group of documents had been buried under a brushmaker’s factory (which later became the site of the Chinese embassy in Poland) just before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Although the Chinese embassy staff gave their permission for Israelis to search the site, nothing was ever found.
 |
| Poster art for Who Will Write Our History |
For those feeling traumatized by the growing displays of racism and white supremacy now filling the news (as well as those living in dread of the upcoming midterm elections), let me suggest a book project that can be done alone or shared with friends. First read Sam Kassow's Who Will Write Our History. Follow it with Aaron Lansky's literary adventure in dumpster diving entitled Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books.
By the time you've finished both books, you'll have a much deeper understanding of how the need to preserve one's cultural heritage can spark a deeply personal type of conspiracy. Let your reward be a chance to watch Grossman's compelling docudrama. Here's the trailer:
* * * * * * * * *
While some members of the Oyneg Shabes group were able to draw up their last will and articulate how they hoped people would remember them, many people die before ever getting around to memorializing their final wishes. In the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, countless gay men died without ever having drawn up a will (some parents only learned that their son was gay following his death).The California Shakespeare Theater is currently presenting the West Coast premiere of Everybody (a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) in a provocative production which, on extremely short notice, invites audiences to contemplate their own mortality. As the play begins, an actor portraying God walks the audience through the standard warnings about cell phones, candy wrappers, and exit locations before explaining the evolution of Everybody from a Buddhist fable to its latest version.
 |
| Britney Frazier as God in a scene from Everybody (Photo by: Alessandra Mello) |
Soon, an old man appears as Death, roaming the audience and choosing several people seated in various sections of the outdoor amphitheatre while explaining that God has tasked him with the job of preparing them for their final moments on earth. At first, these “somebodies” are understandably reluctant to get with the program. Each offers a fairly lame excuse explaining why this is not the best time for them to die. Death’s solution is to counter with a simple offer: If they can find a friend who is willing to accompany them on a journey from which they are highly unlikely to return, then they’re more than welcome to bring their friend along.
 |
| Lance Gardner as one of the five Somebodies whose roles are assigned nightly by lottery, with Victor Talmadge as Death in Everybody (Photo by: Alessandra Mello) |
Everybody is actually a modern version of Everyman, a morality play that premiered in 1510. Although presumably written by Dutch monks, the play traces its roots back to a Buddhist fable. As dramaturg Phillipa Kelly explains: "Everyman was called a morality play because it reminded human beings that their deeds would be weighed and measured at death (possibly ameliorated by a cleansing detox in purgatory), that everything is accountable, and nothing gets by the all-seeing eye of God. Back then, everyone listening to this incarnation of the story was Catholic. Today, not all of us believe in God. But there’s no escaping death."
My only prior experience with Everyman was in high school, where it vied for the dubious honor of the English literature reading assignment most likely to put me to sleep. Due to my lack of life experience, a bad translation, and a teenager's immaturity, I rarely made it past page 10 of Everyman (I got as far as page 23 with Silas Marner but that, too, was a lost cause).
 |
| Jomar Tagatac as one of the five Somebodies whose roles in Everybody are assigned nightly by lottery (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
Thankfully, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been able to breathe lots of life into Everybody, with director Nataki Garrett keeping the CalShakes audience on edge as actors roam the theatre, sometimes lip syncing to prerecorded passages while, at other times, speaking naturally (it takes a while for audiences to realize that this technique is used to differentiate between the main part of the play and the parts that take place in Everybody’s dreams.
“Is theater still a moral force? Is there a relationship between morality and the theater? Because there’s this assumption that people make that when you enter the theater it automatically makes you a better person, or a more engaged person," notes the playwright. "What An Octoroon taught me is that the theatrical form itself is pretty apolitical. Theater itself can be used for evil as well as good. So I became interested in what would make theater a moral good. Theater doesn’t wait for anybody. It rewards people who care about the form and who show up. How perfect a metaphor is that for life? And where better to practice feeling the fear of death and solitude than in a place where we are all together, breaking bread and sharing laughter?”
Back in 2016, when the Shotgun Players staged Mark Jackson’s “Hamlet Roulette” approach to Shakespeare’s tragedy, audiences were not just familiar with the play’s characters but with many of production’s cast members as well. When the actors drew cards from the lottery identifying which roles they would play at any performance, the audience could easily grasp the challenge of matching a particular actor to a particular role.
 |
| Jenny Nelson as one of the five Somebodies whose roles in Everybody are assigned nightly by lottery (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
In BJJ’s adaptation of Everyman, the casting of such roles as Understanding/God, Death, Love, and Time is fixed. However, the other five actors (Somebodies) have their roles (Everybody, Friendship, Kinship, Beauty, and Strength) assigned nightly by lottery. This poses a different challenge, since few in the audience are familiar with the original play or all of the actors in the cast. Nor can they link which roles the actors have chosen at the moment each ball is pulled from the lottery device.
As a result, the lottery’s choices may be thrilling to company members, but there isn’t the same emotional investment in the casting results by the audience as what happened at performances of Hamlet Roulette. Since Everybody is only receiving a two-week run, there are also fewer opportunities for audience members to return to experience another casting permutation. Jacob-Jenkins, however, views the situation through a very different lens.
“Everybody is a play about death, but also it’s a play about hope. There’s a hope for humanity to change itself, to die a noble death, to right its wrongs. A person needs to know that change is possible, that redemption is possible, and that’s the perfect thing: to just tell people that there are other choices in life. The original conceit of both the version we all know and the one it was based on (the original Dutch version) was about a white dude going through life. What if it’s a woman? I tried that, but didn’t love the pressure it put on femininity (it also seemed to give male viewers an out or something by putting it at a remove from them)."
“What if there is a way to talk about identity politics that’s inclusive, yet also acknowledges the reality of death, the reality of chance, and the reality of change? With the lottery, chance has made the choice that this is the person you have to identify with if you want to think about your own life and death. If you want this play to work, this is who’s in the room with you right now -- this is who chance has elected to be this person. For me, this is about asking people to acknowledge their capacity for radical empathy -- to feel connected to people who don’t look like them, but who remind them that they are in possession of the same thing everyone has: a body that is going to die.”At the performance I attended, Britney Frazier portrayed Understanding and God (who welcomes the audience and wraps up the evening) while Victor Talmadge appeared as Death. Jomar Tagatac portrayed Friendship (who happily tells Everybody that he would follow her to hell and back -- until it becomes obvious that Hell might very well be Everybody's ultimate destination). Jenny Nelson appeared as Kinship, Avi Roque as Love, Lance Gardner as Strength, and Sarita Ocón as Beauty.
Stacy Ross (who "won" the evening's lottery) gave a profoundly moving performance in the title role. In the moments when Everybody finally accepted the inevitability of death, she learned that the only character who would not desert her was Love -- whose trust and devotion she had earned through a life filled with compassion. The play's moral is simple: At the end of life, the only thing people can take to the grave with them is a history of good deeds.
 |
| Stacy Ross as one of the five Somebodies whose roles in Everybody are assigned nightly by lottery (Photo by: Alessandra Mello) |
This CalShakes production is blessed with Nina Ball’s simple yet stunning unit set, costumes by Naomi Arnst, lighting designed by Xavier Pierce, and sound designed by Jake Rodriguez. The 90-minute performance moves at a fairly rapid pace even as, in one scene, actors come through the audience while manipulating giant skeleton puppets similar to the figures seen during celebrations of Mexico's popular Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).
 |
| Avi Roque as Love in a scene from Everybody (Photo by: Alessandra Mello) |
Although Everybody was commissioned by and had its world premiere at the Signature Theatre in New York, it's a perfect fit for the New Classics Initiative recently announced by CalShakes (a program designed "to explore what it means to be a classical theatre in the 21st century by commissioning contemporary playwrights to re-imagine classic Western drama and to introduce works from different cultures and traditions into our canon"). As Jacob-Jenkins notes:
“Part of the journey of the play is watching the person move beyond the confines of the body, which is what identity is really rooted in as far as we understand it. For a while, I tried all these different ideas and then I thought: What if I didn’t choose? What if I released that choice? The thing we can all relate to is the chaos and chance and the different ways that life takes its forms. In some ways, I made something that’s impossible to rehearse. But life is also impossible to rehearse -- you just learn some things and hope. Working with that metaphor became the key to the whole experience. The whole point of this was to make us question every assumption we have about making theater. Theater is about rehearsal and about repeating action, so how do you build a rehearsal for a thing that won’t, by nature, repeat?
 |
| Stacy Ross and Sarita Ocón in a scene from Everybody (Photo by: Alessandra Mello) |
Performances of Everybody continue through August 5 at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda (click here for tickets).
No comments:
Post a Comment