Our Class
Tadeusz Slobodzianek, Adapted by Neman Allen
Z Space and Arlekin
Sitting in a semi-circle in front of a mammoth, back-wall chalk board, ten people — obviously in the roles of young children — nervously struggle to read lines from their books. They introduce themselves by what their parents do and what they one day hope to do for a living (e.g., seamstress, pilot, teacher, cobbler, movie star). The writing on the chalkboard behind lists their names and the year, 1925. They are ten children, all friends, living in Jedwabne, Poland — five who are Catholic, five who are Jewish in a small town where Catholics and Jews have lived together for over 1000 years as neighbors.
But in just a matter of a few years, on July 10, 1941, half of the town — approximately 1600 Jewish men, women, and children — will be slaughtered by many of their non-Jewish neighbors while others in the town either watched silently or tried to hide behind closed doors and ignore the atrocity. Locked in a kerosene-soaked barn that is set on fire, all but seven of the Jews from Jedwabne died in that one day stacked in layers on top of each other. Until 2000 and the publishing of a book, The Neighbors, by Princeton professor, Jan T. Gross, the world was told that the Jews died at the hands of the occupying Nazis — a lie created by the Jedwabne perpetrators themselves and still purported as truth by the current, Polish, right-wing government.
In a co-production with Boston-based Arlekin, Z Space presents Our Class, a gripping, heart-pounding play written in 2008 by Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek and subsequently produced in many languages around the world, recounting the lives — and deaths — of these ten children (eight of them real people) over the next near-eighty years, 1925 – 2005. In 2023, the immigrant-based theatre company, Arlekin, under the direction of Ukrainian-born Igor Golyak, revived Our Class off-Broadway, winning many major awards. Z Space and Arlekin’s current West Coast premiere in San Francisco is a more contemporary version adapted by Norman Allen with a stunning, stellar cast of stage and film that includes some of the original 2009 and 2023 actors. This too-short run (ten performances in eight-days) is a must-see that is guaranteed to teach its audience an important, too-long-ignored history lesson — a lesson packed with current, crucial implications that does not provide easy answers but one that leaves us with hard questions we all need to be asking ourselves.
In fact, Our Class is presented as a series of fourteen”lessons,” with the initial few passing by fairly quickly as we watch the children progress from elementary to high school doing what kids often do as they play and learn together. In Lesson Two, the kids even act out on the playground a wedding where one of the Jewish kids and one of the non-Jewish are ‘married’ under an umbrella chuppa as they all sing “Tumbalalaika,” a yiddish folk and love song that even we as audience are invited to join in.
But the world outside the classroom begins to have its effects on this group of boy/girl chums. A Polish government directive dictates in 1937 prayer in schools, with a recitation of the Catholic catechism in front of a large cross in the classroom excluding the Jewish students who congregate outside. The religious fervor of some of the now high-school Catholic kids and the feeling of unfair exclusion by the Jewish ones leads to conflicts, including the school-yard beating of one Jewish boy, Menachem. One senses maybe these tensions are not altogether new but have been seething and showing their ugly faces during the past hundreds of years. As the next lesson ensues, we hear of Jewish stores being ransacked and see more, sudden tensions among the now young adults who still try from time to time to smooth over relations and hug over a beer as they toast each other as friends forever.
An agreement between Hitler and Stalin divides Poland into two parts, with Jedwane landing in the Communist half. Lessons now get increasingly more dangerous for both the Jewish and non-Jewish friends, with spying and betrayals occurring as each side struggles whether to believe the promises of Communistic egalitarianism or to fight underground for a return to a nationalistic, Polish fatherland.
The sense of who is the ‘other’ and who is to blame for the Communist takeover deepens divisions and tensions. By the time in 1941 when the Germans break the pact with Stalin and take over all of Poland, a climate of distrust and retribution builds among the non-Jewish friends, more and more who now believe it was the Jews who welcomed and wanted the Communists.
Former school pals stone to death one of their once-classmates — the actual fate of Jewish Jakub Katz in July 1941. Within days, a gang of the village’s hoodlums, (70-80 men represented in Our Class by four boys-now-men calling themselves “The Four Musketeers”) round up all the town’s Jews, leading to the the horrific, barn-bolted massacre that the villains will soon deny happened due to the action of any villager.
Lessons 8-14 detail the aftermath as we watch in stunned, shocked silence as denials, lies, and guilt mount while desperate decisions play out how to survive; how to move on with life; and how to justify, forget, and in some few cases finally acknowledge at death’s door what actually happened.
As lessons progress from childhood to death, we can never forget that these were once children at play together. Jan Pappelbaum’s set design is dominated by the huge blackboard that becomes a palette for chalked, child-like drawings (all designed by Andreea Mincic) by actors who also chalk — often frantically — lists of dates/names/events, Bible verses, headlines, or outlines representing a dug grave pit or a body being stoned.
The stones thrown are actually kids’ volleyballs. Victims are represented by caricatures drawn by their murderers on white balloons that will rise to heaven and burst as they die (all properties also designed by Pappelbaum). A several-story-high, moving ladder that once served like a jungle gym on the playground later becomes a barn silo’s hiding refuge, an unsuccessful escape route for a victim hanging high by one hand, or the site of a young woman’s rape. Projections designed by Eric Dunlap and Igor Golyak are sometimes a child’s version of a moving land or sky scape and are at other times a real-time, on-stage filming of a letter’s contents as dictated by its writer in America to his classmates back in Poland. Music of the passing eras as composed by Anna Drubich often mirrors events first playful and celebratory and later ones that are threatening, frightening, and tragic. Sounds initially silly and soothing morph eventually into those ever more stark and startling, all designed by Ben Williams.
The people we meet as first children, then as teens, and finally as adults who range from their twenties to wheelchair-bound seniors (each according to when death occurs) — all are emblazoned in our memory banks given the incredible talents of this much-accomplished cast. Some we will recall only as hideous villains; some as innocent victims; some as aspects of both; but all will challenge us with the troubling, soul-searching question, which would I have been? What would I have done under the same circumstances?
More importantly, as we serve as witnessing students in this classroom setting of Our Class, we must decide what and who will I be today, given the lessons I have been taught? Am I just a bystander who will do all I can to ignore the growing acts of antisemitism occurring by the scores locally, nationally, and internationally or will I be an up stander and do what I can to fight the wrongs I see as more and more as people around us are singling out others they see as ‘the other,’ — people of other nationalities, races, religions, sexual orientations or even politics.
Our Class provides lessons for all of us as we experience the power of live theatre and its ability to change lives. The timing of Z Space and Arlekin’s San Francisco production could not be more urgent as even our own U.S. government is actively denying and trying to erase dark periods of our country’s history and as daily headlines online and in newspapers blast more atrocities against immigrants, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ folk, and more. Norman Allen’s adaptation of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class is a timely must see not for enjoyment per se, but for an awakening of what is happening right now that is not that dissimilar to what happened in one of the darkest periods of all history a mere eighty-plus years ago on July 10, 1941.
Rating: 5-E, MUST SEE
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Our Class continues through April 5, 2026, in a two-hour, forty-five-minute (one intermission) in a co-production by Z Space and Arlekin 450 Florida Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available at https://www.zspace.org/.
Photo Credits: Olga Maturana
