Kindertransport played straight
by MYRON GALLOWAY
Westmount resident Gabrielle Soskin deserves respect and admiration for chutzpah.
As artistic director and the moving force behind her recently formed Persephone Productions, the enterprising Soskin has overtaken a large space in a building at 3819 Calixa Lavallée in east end Lafontaine Park (near Rachel St.) that contains an arrangement of arena-style seats, but no stage , and turned it into a makeshift theatre for her company.
Soskin, graduate of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School who now teaches theatre at John Abbott College, has already presented an ambitious production there of an adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with a cast of local, paid actors.
The talented young actors in her latest production, Diane Samuels' Kindertransport, a play that has previously been produced in both London and New York, are also being paid.
The play deals with the transportation to London of young German-Jewish children in the '30s during the wave of anti-Semitism that followed the Nazis rise to power.
Confused and emotionally unprepared for being torn from their families, some 10,000 children were sent to England before the Nazis clamped down on the practice.
Samuels' play is the ficticious account of what happened to nine-year old Eva, one such German-Jewish child.
Reluctantly separated from her parents, Eva is temporarily adopted by Lil.
Not knowing the language, and a stranger to her new surroundings. Eva quickly adapts. Little by little, she forgets her mother's reckless promise to join her shortly.
Eva's father is killed in a concentration camp, and when her mother does finally join her some six or seven years later, she discovers that Eva is a starnger, having bonded so closely with her English "mother".
Thoroughly Anglicized, Eva marries and has a child of her own, her past stuffed away in boxes int he attic.
When her grown daughter, on the brink of leaving home to live on her own, accidentally stumbles on the evidence of her mother's roots, she demands answers to some distressing questions about her lineage.
As a play, Kindertransport is a somewhat skimpy, and undramatic account of a highly dramatic situation that has left most of its inherent drama on the cutting room floor, so to speak. And Soskin has dutifully, given it straightforward, undramatic direction.
Performances throughout, in keeping with the direction, are highly competent.
I particularly liked Jennifer Wade's German mother, and the talented young Nicole Shery as the young exported Eva.
Andrée McNamara Tait is competent as the older Eva, now calling herself Evelyn, as is Melanie Giliati as her daughter Faith. But the playwright has not given these characters much to do.
Considerably more outstanding is the performance of Karen Cromar as Lil, though I wish she had found some other way of interpreting the aging process of a grandmother than the clichéd trick of adopting a crone-like lumbago shuffle to suggest near senility.
Lael Stellick played a series of cameo characters that ranged from train conductor to Nazi Gestapo officer.
The company should perhaps attempt a dramatically more challenging play next time out.
Reprinted from The Suburban October 9, 2002
Westmount resident Gabrielle Soskin deserves respect and admiration for chutzpah.
As artistic director and the moving force behind her recently formed Persephone Productions, the enterprising Soskin has overtaken a large space in a building at 3819 Calixa Lavallée in east end Lafontaine Park (near Rachel St.) that contains an arrangement of arena-style seats, but no stage , and turned it into a makeshift theatre for her company.
Soskin, graduate of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School who now teaches theatre at John Abbott College, has already presented an ambitious production there of an adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with a cast of local, paid actors.
The talented young actors in her latest production, Diane Samuels' Kindertransport, a play that has previously been produced in both London and New York, are also being paid.
The play deals with the transportation to London of young German-Jewish children in the '30s during the wave of anti-Semitism that followed the Nazis rise to power.
Confused and emotionally unprepared for being torn from their families, some 10,000 children were sent to England before the Nazis clamped down on the practice.
Samuels' play is the ficticious account of what happened to nine-year old Eva, one such German-Jewish child.
Reluctantly separated from her parents, Eva is temporarily adopted by Lil.
Not knowing the language, and a stranger to her new surroundings. Eva quickly adapts. Little by little, she forgets her mother's reckless promise to join her shortly.
Eva's father is killed in a concentration camp, and when her mother does finally join her some six or seven years later, she discovers that Eva is a starnger, having bonded so closely with her English "mother".
Thoroughly Anglicized, Eva marries and has a child of her own, her past stuffed away in boxes int he attic.
When her grown daughter, on the brink of leaving home to live on her own, accidentally stumbles on the evidence of her mother's roots, she demands answers to some distressing questions about her lineage.
As a play, Kindertransport is a somewhat skimpy, and undramatic account of a highly dramatic situation that has left most of its inherent drama on the cutting room floor, so to speak. And Soskin has dutifully, given it straightforward, undramatic direction.
Performances throughout, in keeping with the direction, are highly competent.
I particularly liked Jennifer Wade's German mother, and the talented young Nicole Shery as the young exported Eva.
Andrée McNamara Tait is competent as the older Eva, now calling herself Evelyn, as is Melanie Giliati as her daughter Faith. But the playwright has not given these characters much to do.
Considerably more outstanding is the performance of Karen Cromar as Lil, though I wish she had found some other way of interpreting the aging process of a grandmother than the clichéd trick of adopting a crone-like lumbago shuffle to suggest near senility.
Lael Stellick played a series of cameo characters that ranged from train conductor to Nazi Gestapo officer.
The company should perhaps attempt a dramatically more challenging play next time out.
Reprinted from The Suburban October 9, 2002
