Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Michael Rubenfeld & Sarah Garton Stanley, directed by Sarah Garton Stanley
Selfconscious Theatre, Factory Theatre, Toronto
November 15-25, 2018
Katka: “You think Poland is one big cold rainy cemetery”
When you go to We Keep Coming Back by Michael Rubenfeld with Mary Berchard and Katka Reszke, be aware that it is a performance rather than a traditional play. Michael, Mary and Katka recreate a trip they actually took together to Poland and tell their story directly to the audience. The story is enhanced with projections by Trevor Schwellnus and live video shot by Reszke, but in essence the show feels like you have just asked the three on stage “Why did you go to Poland and what was it like?” whereupon they proceed to act out the answer. As with many journeys, what Michael and his mother Mary go to seek is not what they actually find and the great humour of the piece is the group’s absolute willingness to put all their mistakes and misapprehensions on full display.
Why did Michael think that visiting Poland with his mother would be a good idea? The answer is that Michael and his mother found that they so easily get into arguments they can hardly bear to be in the same room with each other. Knowing that he is descended from Polish Jews and that his mother’s parents escaped from the Holocaust, Michael has the idea that if he and his mother were to visit Poland for the first time together, to share their heritage together, they might perhaps discover the common ground that would bring them closer together as mother and son. They could both overcome together the notion that Poland was a subject that was too painful to discuss. The trip would also be documented to be made into a play.
In many ways Michael’s journey reaches its conclusion before it even starts. When he presents his idea for the journey at a conference in Montreal, he meets the graphic designer Magda Koralewska, a lay leader in the Krakow Jewish community. The two fall in love and two years after his trip to Poland with his mother he and Magda marry.
In searching for a guide and translator for the trip, Michael connects with Katka Reszke, a Polish-born, US-based writer, documentary filmmaker, photographer and researcher in Jewish history, culture and identity. She is an expert on the recent reemergence of Jewish culture in Poland and has written a book on the subject of the so-called “unexpected generation” – unexpected because so many people assume, as did Michael and his mother, that all the Jews in Poland were murdered in World War II. Katka herself had been raised a Catholic as had her parents before her in order to hide their Jewishness from others. Now Katka has deliberately set out to reclaim her heritage. Michael, therefore, could hardly have found a better guide for his journey, both physically and spiritually. Merely, knowing Katka helps change Michael and his mother’s view of Poland as a place where Jews still live and thrive.
Yet, travelling through the actual land of their forebears is necessary for Michael and his mother, even though they don’t really set foot on Polish soil together because Michael had arrived earlier to be alone with Magda. This is just one of the many comic deviations from the original plan, all due to Michael putting his desires first, that lend humour to the proceedings.
The prime goal of Michael and his mother’s trip is the village of Komarówka in eastern Poland. After encounters with locals who, much to their surprise, know about the Jewish inhabitants of the town, Michael and his mother have the moving experience of visiting places where they think Mary’s parents lived before the war. This shared feeling of the past seems to bring about the healing between mother and son that Michael had hoped for, until they realize that there are two villages in eastern Poland named Komarówka and they have no way of knowing if they visited the right one.
While this whole experience is played as if it were an absurdist comedy, Katka wonders what difference it makes to the reality of what the mother and son felt whether it took place in the right spot on not. The important point that Katka is making is that just as she is a Pole rediscovering her Jewishness, Michael and his mother are Jews rediscovering their Polishness.
Arguments break out along the way between Michael and his mother and between Michael and Katka. Consonant with the overall air of informality of the show, to resolve such disputes Michael has the lights turned up and and asks the audience to weigh in about who is right or not. One of the most unfair questions he asks us is whose family had the worse experience – his grandparents who escaped the Holocaust or Katka’s parents and grandparents who hid their religion.
Fortunately, because director Sarah Garton Stanley was also on hand filming throughout the trip and is not an actor in the show, she places all of Michael’s egocentricity and hotheadedness on full display, along with Katka’s coolness and logical thinking and Mary’s growing weariness with the journey. Stanley’s most brilliant decision is to play the group’s visit to Auschwitz in absolute silence and to allow that silence to linger long enough to penetrate our senses until one of the actors makes a comment.
Why the show has the title it does is not clear. What we find out is that after Michael and Mary’s visit to Poland, the place becomes no longer an unmentionable topic. They arrived thinking of it as a place of death. They left thinking of it as a place of life. Mary made several more trips back to Poland and Michael married Magda and now lives with her in Krakow. Though Michael, Mary and Katka have already performed the show innumerable times since its premiere in 2013, the performance feels absolutely fresh as if it were improvised on the spot.
As a tale of a mother and a son, of people trying to find their roots the better to understand themselves and of the follies of innocents abroad, We Keep Coming Back is a performance piece that anyone will be able to relate to and enjoy. The show demonstrates that to an open mind theatre, like travel, can bring unexpected revelations.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Michael Rubenfeld and Mary Berchard; Michael Rubenfeld, Mary Berchard and Katka Reszke. ©2016 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca/book-tickets/?spektrix_bounce=true
2018-11-18
We Keep Coming Back