Playwright: adapted by Ryan Craig from a play by Tadeusz Slobodzianek. At: Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets: 773-404-7336; www.remybumppo.org; $42.50-$52.50. Runs Through: May 11
First, the facts: On July 10, 1941, all Jewish residents of the Polish village of Jedwabnerecently overrun with Russian armies, but now occupied by German troopswere imprisoned in a barn, which was then torched. For decades, Nazis were thought to be responsible for this atrocity ( even to its inscription on the memorial commemorating the martyrs ), but in 2000, new evidence pointed to domestic anti-Semitism, rooted in alleged pro-soviet sympathies, as the catalyst launching the attack.
War engenders chaos eroding social structure, frequently leading hitherto-obedient citizens to commit rash and/or immoral actions, motivated more by despair than malice. Audience members for whom this phenomenon comes as no surprise will find nothing startling in Tadeusz Slobodzianek's Dickensian saga of schoolchildren whose loyalties are tested by cataclysmic events beyond their control. Playgoers who cling to distinctions of "good" and "bad" during troubled times, on the other hand, are warned to prepare themselves for nearly three hours of bearing witness to human agony shattering the sensitivities of the compassionate.
Not too much, though. Whether the goal of translator/adaptor Ryan Craig was to shelter us from the horror of the events he documents or to prevent the emotional fatigue that comes of prolonged exposure thereto, his roman o tiroirs keeps our purview at a safe distance by means of Brechtian devicesseating dead characters around the perimeter of the stage ( a la Spoon River Anthology ), for example, or depicting a boy's fatal beat-down by repeatedly striking a canvas bag from which red silk spills forth, and a score of quasi-ethnic dances, games, songs and poems. Having done so, however, after the second act turns away from gruesome pageantry to the quieter suffering of post-war survivors now living in fear of retribution for their past crimes, the immediacy of our identification with their plight cannot help but wane.
Director Nick Sandys and Movement choreographer Maureen Jansen have drilled their cast to a finely tuned precision, while Joe Cerqua's original compositions and John Boesche's projections conjure specific locales within Joe C. Klug's minimalist scenic design. The irony of such dazzling theatrical legerdemain employed in service of an epic better suited to a novel than to a play is that its cumulative effect is to send us home educated, enlightened and appropriately sympathetic, but curiously dry-eyed.