[Thank you for returning to Rick On Theater for the conclusion of “The Last Cyclist.” The first part of this post was published on Friday, 2 September, and covered the background and production history of the play, a bio of the author, and examination of the physical production (set, costumes, and make-up). If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend you go back and pick it up before reading Part 2, below.
[The last part of this report contains a plot synopsis, my evaluation of the productions and performances, and a survey of the published reviews. It will make much more sense if you read the first part before reading Part 2.]
The Last Cyclist’s premise, simply put, is that a group of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp known as the Terezín Ghetto are rehearsing a zany slapstick comedy in which escapees from an insane asylum (called simply the Lunatics: Ambrose Martos, Kirsten Hopkins, Timur Kocak, Craig Anderson) take over the world.
As we hear Older Šedová’s voice-over, we watch the actors assemble for the dress rehearsal: one actress climbs the narrow stairs to the performance space carrying one of the bikes; others are putting on make-up, carrying props to the stage, sweeping the stage, and getting into their places.
“Acting nourished me in the face of starvation,” says Older Šedová. “We were miserable and frightened and our director”—that would have been Karel Švenk—“made us laugh—and we made the audience”—other Terezin prisoners—“laugh. It was a gift beyond imagining.”
Because the Lunatics hate their bike-riding physician (Kocak), they target all cyclists, blaming them for the troubles afflicting society.
At the heart of the play lies an old joke that was well-known in Europe and often repeated between the world wars. After Older Šedová’s intro, Hitler (Eric Emil Oleson, holding a black plastic comb under his nose) addresses a small crowd:
My fellow citizens, our country is in crisis. We must rid ourselves of the monstrous perversion that is destroying society. Who is to blame for all our troubles? The Jews!
A heckler at the back of the crowd (Clay Westman) shouts: And the cyclists!
After a quick, confused look at the young interrupter, Hitler returns to his harangue: Who is destroying our economy and robbing our wives and children? The Jews!
The young man: And the cyclists!
Hitler, with a quizzical, impatient glance at the young man: Who is the parasite on the body of the nation? The Jews!
The young man: And the cyclists!
Hitler, now studiously ignoring him and ratcheting up the rhetoric: Who is undermining our proud spirit with their whining and conniving? The Jews!
The young man: And the cyclists!
Hitler, finally exasperated: Why the cyclists?
The young man, shrugging: Why the Jews?
The goose-stepping lunatic leader, known as Ma’am (Jenny Lee Mitchell), who soon dons a black leather trench coat, and her followers exploit the growing anti-cyclist hysteria and plot to eliminate everyone whose family has had anything to do with bicycles for several generations back by sending them to Horror Island, where they will be inexorably starved to death. She searches for a “slogan” to catalyze her rabble-rousing campaign and sets on “Death to Cyclists!”
Ma’am and Hitler speak with German accents. With one exception, they’re the only two characters who do that; the third is Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld as Red, whose accent may have been meant to be Russian or Czech as Red is a socialist or communist, another group the Nazis sent to concentration camps. (I couldn’t hear Red’s accent clearly enough to be sure. It may well also have been German, as Germany had home-grown communist revolutionaries, as demonstrated in the 1919 Spartacist Uprising.)
Ma’am is aided by Rat (Oleson), who had been the doctor’s assistant, a sort of asylum trusty and habitual enabler. As the doctor’s aide, Rat provided the inmates with liquor and other contraband and let them run amok in the asylum for his own amusement. When they begin to take over and the doctor upbraids Rat for becoming the inmates’ friend, Rat chases his superior off the stage and, presumably, strangles him with his own necktie.
As Ma’am’s gofer, Rat little by little becomes her SA-like henchman, adding bits of uniform over his asylum garb until, by the end of the play, he’s wearing a complete military outfit, including a field cap, greatcoat, and shoulder belt.
A naïve, sometimes hapless hero, Bořivoj Abeles (Patrick Pizzolorusso—who slightly resembles actor Mark Linn-Baker)—the role originally played by Karel Švenk—buys a bike to impress his girlfriend, Mánička (Rosenfeld)—the part undertaken at Terezin by Jana Šedová—and becomes the lunatics’ prime enemy.
Abeles has a rival for Mánička, though. He’s the town’s collaborator, a survivor at any cost. In the play, he’s known as Opportunist and Big Shot (Lynn Berg) and in one of his guises, he absurdly sells life insurance in a society where life is meaningless, cruelly hawking his ironic contracts.
(A note about the name Bořivoj Abeles: it’s a humorous combination of the mythic ancestor of the Czech people and a Jewish last name [pronounced ah-buh-LEZ in the performance], derived from the biblical name Abel, the younger son of Adam and Eve in Genesis.
(Bořivoj I [c. 852-c. 889] was the first historically documented ruler of Bohemia—his father was the mythical Prince Hostivít—and progenitor of the Czech nation. Reportedly, Czechs who hear this name, laugh.)
Some writers, including the author of the Last Cyclist website, dubbed Abeles a shlemiel, which Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines as “a foolish person, a simpleton . . . [a] consistently unlucky person, . . . [a] clumsy . . . type . . . [a] pipsqueak.” But he’s not. He is a “naïve, trusting [to a degree], [sometimes] gullible customer.”
While trying to impress Mánička, he does smack himself in the nose when demonstrating his boxing prowess, and he does buy a bicycle just when the Lunatics have busted out of the asylum and decided to go after anyone with a bike, but otherwise, at least as played by Pizzolorusso and directed by Einhorn, mostly he’s kindhearted, rather stalwart, and pretty lucky at important moments.
He’s a grocer with his own shop whose grandfather had been a pack-peddler. In the shtetl, that’s movin’ on up!
And when Opportunist pulls a Harold Hill on him to get him to buy insurance, though he’s briefly caught up in the salesman’s spiel, he resists at the right moment and sends the goniff of with a flea in his ear!
He also truly loves Mánička, which is more than can be said for Opportunist, and she loves him back, which scarcely makes him a hard-luck guy. Irrespective of the real-life fates of Karel Švenk and Jana Šedová, Bořivoj Abeles and Mánička get their happy ending.
After Ma’am has promulgated her new anti-cycling laws, Rat rounds up the townsfolk with bikes and they’re shipped off to Horror Island. Among the exiled cyclists are Red (Rosenfeld), a socialist revolutionary, and her counterpart, the wealthy capitalist, Rich (Westman)—because he is—who are among the townspeople required to play a travesty of the actual Red Cross inspection of Terezin that had taken place in June 1944.
Švenk’s Horror Islanders are given a script (“Dear Red Cross Guest,” a fragment of an unpublished song Švenk wrote at Terezin) that they must follow during the Red Cross visit, but unlike the real Terezin prisoners, they can’t keep up the pretense and blurt out the truth of their situation and they’re marched away to be punished.
This was, in my judgment, the play’s most effective scene. The humor was mordant, but the drama was devastating.
Abeles, too, had been arrested for owning a bike, but in a stroke of luck, he fell overboard from the transport ship as it was sailing out of the port for Horror Island. He swam ashore and found Mánička looking for him, determined to make her own way to Horror Island to be with him.
Unluckily (okay, he’s a bit of a shlemiel—but just wait), he’s caught again by Rat’s cyclist-hunters, and incarcerated in a cage at the zoo. (The sign by his pen reads: rare and exceedingly dangerous last living specimen of the condemned cyclistic species.) Nearby is the rocket ship on which he will be transported to the moon as his sentence.
Now, Spoiler Alert:
As a last request, Abeles asks to smoke a cigarette. There’s a vaudeville routine with the butt between Ma’am and Lunatic 2 (Kirsten Hopkins), and Ma’am and her cohort go inside the rocket to inspect it. Opportunist/Big Shot (Berg) gets an oversized match to light the condemned man’s cigarette, strikes it, and inadvertently ignites the rocket’s fuse, sending the dictator and her minions to the moon (in the absolute lowest-tech special effect ever seen on a stage outside a kiddie play!).
(By the way, that makes Opportunist the shlemiel—the guy who spills his soup—and Ma’am and her crew the shlemazels—they guy he spills it on!)
On this note, Abeles runs to the front of the stage and shouts to the audience, “Go home! You are free! The rule of lunacy is over!” But Mánička knows better. “No,” she says sadly, “only here on the stage have we been freed. Out there, where you are, the rule of madness continues.”
In the real “real” world, the Terezín prisoner-actors—all but one—and their fellow inmates faced their fate among the six million Jews worked or starved to death or outright murdered during the Holocaust.
Patz’s bookend additions bring the performance back to Terezin and Švenk’s reality. After a reprise of the Jews-cyclists routine, the cast sings the chorus of Švenk’s “Terezin March,” augmented with some of the text from one of the verses:
Where there’s a will there’s a way.
We’ll survive another day,
And together, hand in hand,
We’ll laugh at hardship.
(Švenk’s original music for The Last Cyclist had, like the script, been lost forever, but music for some of his other cabarets, such as the “Terezin March”—written for his first show at the camp, but used as a finale for several others—is, however fragmentary, still around, thanks to the Terezín Music Foundation in Boston.
(The music for Patz’s reconstruction of The Last Cyclist, commissioned by the TMF, is by the award-winning composer Stephen Feigenbaum. A songwriter, and singer as well as a composer, Feigenbaum has won a 2005 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for Piano Quartet and a 2013 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.)
The play comes to an abrupt ending and the rehearsal concludes when Švenk (Pizzolorusso) reads the news of a prisoner round-up for transportation. As they file out of the theater, the actors reveal the names of the real people, the original cast members from Terezin, they represented in the performance. As the actors say their avatars’ names, they lay the hats they’re wearing in a line across the front of the stage behind the footlights.
Only Rosenfeld, who represented Jana Šedová, the sole survivor of the cast, doesn’t put down a hat. The last shot of the film, as the credits roll, is of the line of hats standing for the prisoner-actors who perished at the hands of the Nazis in the war’s last year.
Except for the opening scene with Hitler (who isn’t named), nothing in the play talks about the Holocaust or Nazis or Jews. It’s an allegorical warning about the dangers of totalitarianism, herd-like obedience, and the frightening extremes to which bullying can lead. (I wonder . . . is there anything like that happening today in this country?)
The Terezin Council of Elders still banned the play after its dress rehearsal. They were afraid of reprisals because Švenk’s satire and the play’s references to the irrational behavior of dictators and their followers were so blatantly and transparently anti-Nazi.
In the live stage version of the play, the conceit is that the spectators are fellow Terezin prisoners attending the dress rehearsal of Švenk’s cabaret play in 1944. For the film, the live audience at La MaMa takes on that same role, and we in the movie’s audience join them in that capacity (however metaphysically).
Einhorn has said that the film technique let him use camera angles to give the viewers the feeling that they are right there, too. (I’m not sure I buy that. If I were at the theater in person, would I get so close up, as I did with the film, that I can see the hairs in Rat’s mustache? The laugh-lines under the make-up around the actors’ eyes?)
Several of the critics of the 2013 production (see below) remarked that the performances in the West End Theatre production of The Last Cyclist were “amateurish” or “unsophisticated.” The cast is clearly less experienced than most New Yorkers are used to paying to see on the city’s stages, even at schools like NYU or Juilliard.
Off-Off-Broadway, though, is often uneven in its stagecraft, and the West End Theatre production was an Off-Off-Broadway endeavor. But I’m inclined to give the actors the benefit of the doubt. Yes, most of the actors in The Last Cyclist are probably just starting out on a theater career, but it seemed to me that what most of those reviewers dismissed as amateurishness is an attempt by director Einhorn to recreate the performance style of Švenk’s Terezin cabarets, a kind of rough theater.
I think Naomi Patz, when she reconstructed The Last Cyclist based on Jana Šedová’s recollection and her own research into Švenk’s other work and the other Terezin performances, intended the play to be farcical, slapstick, and clownish. Without that element, it would never get past the camp censors. (I’m pretty sure that the Hitler scene that opens the play is an addition by either Šedová in 1961 or Patz forty years later.)
Now, I know from my own performing experience that the kind of low comedy which I believe was Einhorn’s—and probably Švenk’s—aim, is hard to pull off. It not only takes practice and work, but a certain kind of genius that not every performer will have. I’m convinced that what we saw in The Last Cyclist is a company of young actors who aren’t natural clowns or farceurs, trying like hell to get what their director and playwright(s) conceived.
A lot of the time, I think they came pretty close. There weren’t a lot of guffaws in the audience at La MaMa on the night they filmed the play—but there were a fair number of titters and giggles. Listen, it’s hard to get people to laugh at Nazis and the Holocaust. The creators of Hogan’s Heroes (1965-71) did, and so did Mel Brooks—at least twice: The Producers (film, 1965; Broadway, 2001-07), with the play-within-the-movie/play, Springtime for Hitler; and his 1983 remake of To Be or Not to Be.)
I watched the film twice—that’s why I DVR’d it, so I could do that—once straight through to see it as a whole performance and once stopping and starting so I could make notes for this report. I saw what the reviewers adjudged amateurish acting that first time, too, and was prepared to call it that way.
Then, on second viewing, I saw the coherence of the performance with the material. It fit. It didn’t always work, but it didn’t clash with the material. It was consonant with the world of this play as conceived by Patz and Einhorn, this absurd place where loonies take over not just the asylum, but the whole society. Where enmity was declared against anyone with a bike.
Mitchell, as Ma’am, was pretty far out there, with the goose-step and the loose flaps of fabric that had tied the arms of her straitjacket behind her fluttering about at the ends of her sleeves whenever she moved her arms, the very image of nuttiness. She, like Oleson, her cohort Rat, really went with the eccentric performance style.
So did the two craziest Lunatics, Anderson and Hopkins. They totally committed to the mad world of this play. There’s enough Brechtian distancing going on—the face make-up and the tattered-pajama costumes, for instance—to make it impossible to identify with these characters, so I can’t say I “believed” them, but I did understand what they were up to and what Švenk/Patz/Einhorn were trying to communicate through them.
When it came to Pizzolorusso and Rosenfeld, the two lovers at the center of The Last Cyclist, since their behavior was pretty natural (as far as farce will let that be), I could identify and empathize with their characters. Like the unerwünschte Personen (undesirable persons, personae non gratae) of the Third Reich, they had no idea, I felt, what was happening to them.
They put that across well, especially Pizzolorusso, whose performance I found most touching and poignant. He underplayed just right for my dough, on a stage filled with high-voltage scenery-chewing—a little island of humanity amidst a world gone nuts.
I usually do a round-up of published reviews at the end of my play reports. I’m going to do this for The Last Cyclist, but my tack will be a little different. For my usual reports, I stay with reviews of the production I saw for the most part, sometimes regardless of the home base of the outlet.
In the case of The Last Cyclist, I’m going to make an assumption. I’m positing that the 2013 stage version at the West End Theatre was essentially the same production (with minor differences, I grant you) as the 2020 film version I recorded last 22 August.
There weren’t many reviews of the Theater Close-up broadcast of Švenk’s play. There were, though, a fair number of notices for the West End Theatre mounting. They had the same director, the same composer, the same lighting designer, and mostly the same cast. Therefore, I’ll take the liberty of quoting from 2013 reviews along with the sole 2020 one.
In Jewish Renaissance, a magazine covering Jewish culture, arts, and communities in Britain and beyond, Judi Herman, dubbing the play “important and moving drama,” proclaimed in 2020, “From the get-go Patz’s film captures the defiant spirit.” She reminded readers, “In the theatre, the audience is cast as the audience of Terezin inmates at that dress rehearsal. The film is shot with a live crowd, but watching online at home, you too become part of it.”
“To composer Stephen Feigenbaum’s plangent score,” found Herman, “the actors seamlessly establish the playing style.” The JR reviewer felt, “Although the acting and movement style are exaggerated in keeping with the stark satire, it is subtly calibrated.” Pizzolorusso/Abeles (whom Herman characterized as “wonderfully appealing”) and Rosenfeld/Mánička were a “tad more naturalistic in dress and playing style” than the rest of the actors/characters.
In conclusion, Herman declared, “Hats off to the 11-strong company, to Patz and to director Edward Einhorn for ensuring Švenk and his fable reach a wider audience at last.”
The New York Times’ Neil Genzlinger explained in 2013:
“The Last Cyclist” isn’t participatory theater in any of the usual senses. . . . . But if you’re attending this intriguing exercise in Holocaust history, you should plan to show up in character. To appreciate what you’re going to see, you need to be not a 21st-century theatergoer but rather a prisoner at Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp near Prague.
Genzlinger labeled Švenk’s play “a scalding satire” and added, “If Ms. Patz’s ‘Last Cyclist’ is at all like the one rehearsed by Svenk . . ., it’s easy to see why the Jewish Council stifled it. The work is a not-at-all-subtle allegory that portrays Hitler and the Nazis as insane.”
As for the present-day “reimagining” of The Last Cyclist, the Timesman declared that it “is amateurish absurdism, and the production here . . . is deliberately rickety, as it would have been in 1944.”
In the end, the Times review-writer advised:
Watching “The Last Cyclist,” you realize that this performance is being presented for an audience that isn’t there. You and your fellow theatergoers are its stand-in. This isn’t theater as entertainment; it’s theater as a chance to bear witness.
Also in 2013, Jennifer Farrar in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant characterized The Last Cyclist as a “crude but well-performed and affecting production.” The reviewer praised Einhorn’s “spirited direction,” reporting that “the homespun, frenetic action unfolds on a small stage within a stage.”
“While the action and characters are often heavy-handed,” Farrar found, “the play credibly conveys the necessity for people to take personal responsibility in resisting prejudice and racism.” The costumes were “colorful, cartoonish” and “[w]ith slapstick and broad, vaudevillian humor,” the actors “parody the random illogic and racism of a world where people were killed just for being Jewish.”
Farrar praised Jenny Lee Miller’s Ma’am for her “chilly superiority” and Eric Emil Oleson’s “villainous derangement” as her “increasingly insane partner in crime.”
At the end of her notice, the HC reviewer observed, “The resurrection of this ironic parable serves as a chilling reminder of the valiant spirits lost in the unthinkable human destruction of the Holocaust.”
In its capsule review in “The Theater” in the “Goings On About Town” section, The New Yorker asserted:
Šedová’s play has value as a historical document, but this production is unsophisticated—an overlong and cartoonish skit played by adult actors behaving, under the direction of Edward Einhorn, like giddy children.
On The Komisar Scoop, blogger Lucy Komisar asserted, “‘The Last Cyclist’ is fascinating in its conception and existence as a satirical political cabaret put on in 1944 by prisoners of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.”
“Judged as an ordinary a piece of theater,” thought Komisar, “the play falters because with one, perhaps two, exceptions, most of the performers are amateurish. On the other hand, the original in the camp also mixed professionals and amateurs, so perhaps this production provides verisimilitude.”
Nevertheless, Komisar praised Mitchell as Ma’am, labeling the actress “a brilliant satirical performer.” She also said “Pizzolorusso does a credible job as Svenk and Borivoj Abeles.”
“Svenk’s play survives as an emblem of his and the actors’ courage,” summed up Komisar.
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