Polish playwright Mrozek wrote of Soviet emigrants in Paris and through them, about emigrants everywhere.
By HELEN KAYETheater Review 88(photo credit: )The Emigrants
By Slawomir Mrozek
Directed by Igor Berezin
Malenky Theater at Simta, Jaffa
November 19
Strangers in a strange land, the hulking peasant and weedy professor are most unlikely partners. AA (Dima Ross) is a political exile from "there," wanted by the repressive Regime for reasons he hints at. BB (Vitaly Voskoboinikov) is an illiterate peasant who has left village and family to make money "here."
It is New Year's Eve. They have no friends, nowhere to go, one can't speak the language at all. What can they do but exchange memories, suspicions, their past, their dreams, their frustrations, their fears and their fragile hopes?
And so they do, very effectively and very movingly, over an easy two-and-a-quarter hours without an intermission, hardly able to move within the grubby confines of their windowless and claustrophobic cellar, ably realized by Paulina Adamov.
Physical emigrants they may be, Mrozek says, buy they are nonetheless prisoners: not only incarcerated in a society that is at best indifferent, at worst hostile, but of the perceptions they have brought with them.
Polish playwright Mrozek wrote of Soviet emigrants in Paris and through them, about emigrants everywhere. By implication, in Berezin's meticulous and sensitively directed production, Mrozek's black comedy applies as easily to the massive Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel in the early '90s - emigrants from their own land and immigrants here. Worth seeing anywhere.
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