The Marcel Marceau that most people, or at least most theater aficionados, know was one of the world’s greatest mimes. As Bip, a lovable, quirky, charming clown, he regaled audiences with a worn top hat from which protruded a floppy red flower. Marceau’s vulnerable and self-effacing persona, though, was but a thin veil obscuring his heroism during World War II, as recounted in Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater’s Marcel on the Train.
At the outset of Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place, a funerary urn, unburied but long ignored, sets off a near-nuclear explosion of familial conflict. It’s a humdinger of a beginning; but, as this short, bleak drama proceeds, the motives of the principal characters remain obscure and the twists in the plot, though often startling, can’t conceal the script’s logical lacunae. It’s a striking weakness, since The Other Place is inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, a compact, laser-focused tragedy that’s intellectually and emotionally satisfying.
In Hate Radio, Swiss writer-director Milo Rau turns the stage into a time capsule of terror, reconstructing the Rwandan radio station RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines), whose jovial hate-fueled broadcasts paved the road to genocide. Listening through headsets as slurs curdle into directives, the audience is left to reckon not only with history’s horrors but with unnerving echoes in today’s media-saturated America.
The same week Haiti was represented in Winter Olympics competition for only the second time in history, WP Theater made its contribution to Haitian pride with the world premiere of The Waterfall, a Haitian American family drama written by Phanésia Pharel, the daughter of Haitian immigrants.
In Roman Freud’s Beneath the Ice of the Vistula, a Polish-Jewish composer named Adam Kobylanski agonizes over a musical composition that he is sure will be a masterpiece. The year is 1939. The Nazi invasion looms on the horizon but is still far enough away that Adam has the time and space to work on his composition in peace.
The Marcel Marceau that most people, or at least most theater aficionados, know was one of the world’s greatest mimes. As Bip, a lovable, quirky, charming clown, he regaled audiences with a worn top hat from which protruded a floppy red flower. Marceau’s vulnerable and self-effacing persona, though, was but a thin veil obscuring his heroism during World War II, as recounted in Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater’s Marcel on the Train.
