After its multiple-award-nominated sold-out run at Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this year, Our Class has transferred Off-Broadway to Classic Stage Company, as part of Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theatre’s four-month two-production residency there. Presented by MART Foundation in association with Jadow Productions, the epic drama, written by Siberian-born Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek (b. 1955) in 2008, and inspired by the real-life historic horror of a 1941 pogrom in the small Polish village of Jedwabne, traces the journey of ten classmates – five Jews, five Catholics – through eight decades, in a new contemporary adaptation by Norman Allen of a literal translation by Catherine Grovesnor. The cast. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. For those not familiar with Słobodzianek’s original narrative and haven’t seen a more faithful rendition of the play, the new version, directed by Arlekin’s Artistic Director Igor Golyak, can be confusing, gimmicky, and emotionally distancing. Framed in the device of a script-in-hand reading by ten present-day actors in current clothing (costumes by Sasha Ageeva; hair and make-up by Timur Sadykov), each of the two acts begins with them seated in an upstage row of chairs before the backdrop of a large-scale blackboard wall (minimalist scenic design by Jan Pappelbaum), with childlike chalk drawings (designed by Andreea Mincic) and inscriptions of the names, birth and death dates of the characters they portray, while learning their lines and songs. Although the figures are all classmates born in the years 1918-20, the cast of the current production encompasses a wide range of ages, from their early twenties to their late fifties, creating a sense of visual confusion, and leaving us questioning if the excellent Richard Topol, who takes charge of the reading, is their teacher and not one of the students. He is, with the scenes presented as a series of numbered “Lessons,” and then he isn’t, as the production progresses to the staged performance and he assumes the role of the young Abram, even though he is clearly not the age of a student. Richard Topol. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. There is also an inconsistent range of accents among the actors from the US, Russia, and Canada; though their characters are all from the same Polish village, they don’t sound like they are. They speak in their own natural voices, until one, portraying a woman who survived and relocated to America, adopts a bad New York accent (which is apparently supposed to be funny, not insulting, to New Yorkers, in a play with a message about accepting people who are different than you). Okay. In addition to those aforementioned incongruities, the format of meta-theatricalization, with many breaks through the fourth wall of the historically based story, in which classmates, friends, and neighbors turned against, beat, raped, and burned to death 1,600 Jews in a barn in their village during WWII (then blamed it on the Nazis), creates a sense of removal from the reality of the true horrors they suffered or caused; they’re obviously actors playing actors playing the victims and perpetrators of the shocking and heartless brutality, so there’s a lessening of the impact of the intentionally, and excessively, dramatized atrocities. The cast. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. Presumably, the point of the conceit is to bring it into our own times, with the unimaginable rise in anti-Semitism and the abhorrent hate crimes we’ve seen within our own population, but the actual events speak for themselves, without the need to reset or to reframe the powerful narrative of the past in a literal interpretation of Spanish-American writer and philosopher George Santayana’s famous quote, “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.” Here the actors are doing precisely that, studying history through their sequence of “Lessons,” and sharing them with us. We get it. With that said, the cast of Gus Birney, Andrey Burkovskiy, José Espinosa, Tess Goldwyn, Will Manning, Stephen Ochsner, Alexandra Silber, Ilia Volok, and Elan Zafir, along with Topol, do a fine job with the material and direction they’ve been given, while actively moving around the stage, the theater, and through the aisles, and appearing on different levels of the backdrop and on a ladder leaning against it. Gus Birney. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. Among the most compelling plot lines is that of Dora, played with youthful sweetness and innocence by Birney, turned in by Espinosa’s hateful and murderous Rysiek (who was attracted to her in school), gang raped, and burned to death with her baby and fellow Jews (intimacy and violence design by Leana Gardella). But in one scene, helium-filled balloons with long strings, weights, and faces drawn on them by the characters are thrown down from above the blackboard, then cut by Dora to ascend to the top of the theater and burst. That kind of conceptualization of the real people who were viciously rounded up and set on fire is another distancing technique that lessens the unconscionable hatred and cruelty inflicted, in a heinous act of man’s inhumanity to man (not to balloons). Another potent storyline is the life of Silber’s Rachelka, which takes an unexpected turn, when, to evade persecution and murder, she accepts the marriage proposal of Władek, portrayed by Volok, under the condition that she convert to Catholicism. She does, is taught the catechism (ironically including the Sixth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill), survives till 2002, and, in her elder years, understandably prefers watching TV shows about animals rather than people. Alexandra Silber (center) and the cast. Photo by Jeremy Daniel. And Topol’s Abram, who left his village to pursue rabbinical studies in America in 1937, then kept in touch with his classmates through letters, consequently survived the Holocaust and propagated the long line of future generations of his family. Though not in Poland, he appears on stage and in the aisles, interacting with the audience and recording himself in live-feed video projections on the blackboard (projection design by Eric Dunlap) – another obvious Ivo van Hove-style anachronism designed to bring the story into today’s world. The performance is enhanced with evocative shifts in lighting by Adam Silverman, sound by Ben Williams, and segments of music and song, in both English and Yiddish (adding an authentic touch), with Lisa Gutkin serving as music director, Anna Drubich as composer, and choreography by Or Schraiber. If you appreciate a conceptual approach to theater with excessive avant-garde stylizations and post-modern gimmicks, this adaptation of Our Class might appeal to you. For those of us who prefer straightforward classic storytelling that doesn’t distance us from the true venom and horrors that people perpetrated on others, including their own former friends and classmates, for being of a different religion, you might want to wait for a more realistic production of a dark chapter in our history that tells it as it was and needs no artsy embellishment to continue to resonate in the present. Running Time: Approximately two hours and 50 minutes, including an intermission. Our Class plays through Sunday, November 3, 2024, at Arlekin Players Theatre, performing at Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, NYC. For tickets (priced at $59-139, plus fees), go online. Please note, the production, recommended for ages 16+, contains mature themes for adult audiences, including acts of violence, sexual assault, anti-Semitic language, and simulated gunshots.