'The Last Cyclist' – Part 1

 

[About two weeks ago, I caught a promo on WNET, New York City’s Public Broadcasting Service station, announcing a broadcast of a play called The Last Cyclist.  I’d heard the name before, seen it in the TV schedule, but I didn’t know what it was.  

[The play was scheduled on Theater Close-up, which, along with Great Performances, I keep an eye on because they show plays.  So I looked this one up to see if it was something I ought to check out.  I decided it was.

[I won’t go into any detail about The Last Cyclist because that’s what this post is about.  I’ll say that it’s a play written at the Nazi concentration camp known as Theresienstadt where a lot of arts, especially performing arts, activity went on despite the horrific circumstances.

[I had already learned of this remarkable phenomenon at Theresienstadt, known in Czech as Terezin, and on 7 March 2022, I posted an article on Rick On Theater called “‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin’” by Bahar Akpinar.  (Before that, on 2 March 2022, I posted the transcript of a 60 Minutes report called "Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it’s being discovered and performed" by Jon Wertheim.)

[I decided, in addition to my curiosity about this unusual play, that I ought to check this show out as an adjunct of what I’d already published on the blog.  So I programmed my DVR to record The Last Cyclist with the intention of writing a play report on it in lieu of an in-person performance—but, as I hope you’ll see, I got much more than that.

[I’ll be posting “The Last Cyclist” in two part.  Part 1, covering the background of the play and its production history and a bio of the playwright, Karel Švenk, is below.  Part 2, with a synopsis of the play, my performance report, and a survey of the published reviews, will be posted on 5 September.]

On Monday, 22 August, at 10 p.m., I recorded the première television broadcast of The Last Cyclist, a Czech play from the Holocaust by Karel Švenk.  The airing was on Theater Close-up, a program of WNET, the Public Broadcasting Service flagship in New York City.  (The première was originally scheduled for Wednesday, August 17, but WNET had technical problems that evening and rescheduled the broadcast.)

Theater Close-Up is a collaboration between WNET (Channel 13) and New York City-area Off-Broadway and regional theaters around the country, spotlighting in primetime a diverse range of innovative theater productions.  The plays are recorded expressly for WNET; The Last Cyclist, directed by Edward Einhorn, who also staged the stage play, was filmed before a live audience at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village over four days in August 2017.  It runs one hour and 37 minutes.

The New York stage production of The Last Cyclist, with the same cast as the film, opened on 30 May 2013 at the West End Theatre at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  It ran on an Off-Off-Broadway schedule, Thursday through Monday, 25 May to 9 June 2013.

The 2017 film version of The Last Cyclist was released in February 2020.  Naomi Patz, an author of several books on Judaism who wrote the script adaptation, and her husband, Rabbi Norman Patz , the rabbi (now emeritus) of Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, produced both the West End Theatre staging and the La MaMa film version.

Karel Švenk (known in German as Karl Schwenk; 1917-45) was a hero to the Jews in the Terezín Ghetto.  (The post “‘Performing for Survival,’” referenced above, includes a brief history of Terezin and the concentration camp the Germans called Theresienstadt.)  

Lovingly remembered as “a sad clown with extremely expressive eyes” and a biting wit, “inexhaustibly inventive, always up to practical jokes and improvisations,” Švenk is described again and again as Chaplinesque and reminiscent of Buster Keaton, “a born comic, an unlucky fellow tripping over his own legs but always coming out on top in the end.”

Karel Švenk was born in Prague—then the capital of Bohemia, part of Austria-Hungary—on 17 March 1917.  He was one of five children, including three sisters and a younger brother.  Both his parents died at Auschwitz in 1944; only one sister survived the Holocaust.

In his late teens and early 20’s, he was one of the pioneers of the avant-garde theater in Prague.  He honed his skills as an actor, director, writer, and composer working as part of a theater group whose name in Czech was Klub zapadlých talent, variously translated as the Club of Wasted Talents, the Theater of Needless Talents, or the Theater of Lost/Superfluous or Useless Talents.  An ardent leftist, he introduced political commentary into his work early on.

Švenk was deported to Terezín on 24 November 1941, on the very first transport, one of 342 young men sent to prepare the camp for the prisoners to come.  Terezín, or Theresienstadt, was not a death camp, but 33,000 Jews died there of starvation and disease.  

Terezin was a transit point for nearly 144,000 Jews, including 15,000 children.  Over four years, some 88,000 Jews were sent from Terezín to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the other death camps.  Only 17,247 people who came through Terezín—including fewer than 200 children—survived the war.

Švenk brought to Terezin with him a portfolio of poetry and the resolve to strengthen and raise the morale of the prisoners.  He did so using laughter and satire as his most potent weapons.  His humor was “subversive, witty and bold.”  

The cabaret he built up in the camp “reflected all the irony, all the mockery, all the distortion of ghetto life,” said Czech journalist Ruth Bondy (1923-2017).  (Bondy, a Zionist even as a teenager, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1948.  She had a career as a writer for the Israeli newspaper Davar and won several literary and journalistic awards.)

Švenk and Rafael Schächter (1905-1945 [on the Auschwitz death march]), a conductor who led choral performances in Terezín, are credited with beginning the cultural activities in the camp.  Early in 1942, they produced their first cabaret, The Lost Food Card.  

The Lost Food Card’s finale, the “Terezín March,” had a simple, catchy melody.  It spoke to the prisoners’ situation in the camp and to their hopes for a brighter future.  It was used as the finale of the first of these shows and became the unofficial anthem of the camp and was reprised by demand in all of Švenk’s later productions and sung or hummed or whistled by prisoners on every other possible occasion.  The lyrics are cited and sometimes quoted in full in many survivors’ memoirs.

Švenk wrote a number of other cabarets at Terezín, including The Last Cyclist: Everything Goes! (42 performances), Ghetto in Itself (38 performances), Long Live Life, or Dance Around a Skeleton (20 performances), and his last cabaret, The Same But Different, staged in March 1944 (29 performances).

On 1 October 1944, Karel Švenk was among the hundreds of people sent to Auschwitz.  From there he was sent to Meuselwitz in Thuringia, Germany, a slave-labor subcamp of Buchenwald, to work in a munitions plant.

In the words of survivor Arnošt Lustig (1926-2011), a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter: “I was with Karel Švenk in Meuselwitz.  Many had only rags on their feet.  Nobody had warm clothes for protection from the piercing cold.  And we were working with steel sheets. . . .  

“We collected bread as much as we could, and persuaded Švenk to sing ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way. . . .  On the ruins of the ghetto we will laugh!’  Švenk was waning before our eyes.  It was his last entrance.  His song meant more to us than bread.” 

Immediately after the war, lifelong friends and fellow actors who were deported with him to Auschwitz and then to Meuselwitz, wrote about those days.   Vilém (Vili) Süssland (1915-c. 1944) recalled: “a man who was ‘so immensely popular . . . overwhelmingly interesting . . . a legendary person’ now ‘bears hunger with difficulty and above all he is freezing during work that is too hard for him.  He is quarrelsome, hysterical and rather unpopular.’” 

(A few weeks after these words were written, Süssland and his brother, actor Jiří, known as “Cajlajs,” 1900-c. 1944, were among the many survivors who died in the first days after liberation.)

Švenk and his comrades were among the prisoners sent, barefoot and starving, on a long “death march” to Mauthausen in Upper Austria in April of 1945, when the Nazis evacuated Meuselwitz in the face of the advancing Red Army. 

Švenk’s spirit was broken, his energy was gone, so he couldn’t keep up with the marchers.  His friend Vili Süssland hid him under some straw in a barn and left him there.  It isn’t certain whether Švenk died of exhaustion or if the SS found him in the barn and shot him.

This man, who inspired so many and gave them hope, at the end had none for himself.  Disoriented and exhausted, he died just a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe (8 May 1945 – VE Day; some sources give 1 April as his date of death, but that’s surely speculative).

“Parody, jokes, improvisation—all this attracted hundreds of people to the attic where Švenk’s cabaret was performed,” wrote Elena Makarova (b. 1951), educator and historian who specializes in Jewish resistance at Terezin.  “When watching . . . people forgot, albeit for a short moment, the surrounding reality—death, hunger, deportations to the East. . . .  The house was always full; people resorted to various tricks to get the tickets.” 

The composer and music critic Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944 [in Auschwitz]), who even in the concentration camp didn’t compromise his professional standards of excellence, called Švenk “our Terezín Aristophanes” who can himself “hardly imagine just how much material, talent and inventiveness he has in stock.”

Quipped Ullmann, “‘Shake before using’—but this time it is the patient himself, not the medicine, that gets shaken.  Having laughed for two hours, you feel simply incapable of criticizing the show.”

Švenk composed six cabarets at Terezin that were performed dozens of times each.  The Last Cyclist, believed to have been written in 1944 following the visit by the Danish Red Cross delegation in June (see “‘Performing for Survival’”), which Švenk lampooned in the play, was the seventh cabaret, but didn’t make it past its dress rehearsal before other inmates.  

The camp’s Nazi-appointed Jewish leadership, the Council of Elders, banned it because of its explicit allegory to the Nazi regime and its agenda.  The inmates could often get away with humor and satire, but this was a step too far, the council felt, and the members, who answered to the Nazis but sought above all to keep their Jewish brethren safe, feared a Nazi reprisal if the play were to be staged.

Švenk’s original scripts and notes for all his Terezin cabarets, including The Last Cyclist, were lost when he took them with him when he was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944.  Most of the actors in the cast and Švenk’s collaborators were transported as well, and only one member of the Last Cyclist company survived the Holocaust.

Gertruda (Trude) Popper (née Skallova; 1920-95), the actress who played the female lead opposite Švenk in his last cabaret, had a job the Nazis designated vital to the German war effort, so she remained at Terezin throughout the war.  (Her husband and parents were all murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.)  After the war, Trude Popper returned to Czechoslovakia, took the stage name Jana Šedová, and became a professional actress.

In 1961, Šedová, the only known survivor of the The Last Cyclist company, rewrote the play from memory, and, with the theater’s director, Darek Vostřel (1929-92), mounted it at the Rokoko Theater in Prague.  It was ostensibly the play’s world première (Poslední cyklista in Czech and Der letzte Radfahrer in German) since it was never officially performed at Terezin, and it remained part of that troupe’s repertoire for a year. 

(The Rokoko, which specialized in musical comedy, saw its original company disbanded in 1974 and in 1975, the theater was absorbed into the union of the Prague municipal theaters, becoming essentially mainstream.  The company’s stage production shouldn’t be confused with a 2014 Czech TV movie, created by Jirí Svoboda and Tomás Töpfer, with the same title, Poslední cyklista, as the Czech title of the Švenk-Šedová play.  Though set in the same period and a similar location—the World War II Auschwitz concentration camp—the plot is entirely different.)

Šedová also wrote an essay on “Theatre and cabaret in the ghetto of Terezín” in Terezin, Terezin, a Czech book published in 1965.  In her essay, she talks about Švenk and gives a one-paragraph summary of the plot of The Last Cyclist.  

In 1995, Naomi Patz came upon the play.  Her husband, Norman, showed her Šedová’s essay in Terezin, Terezin.  She was intrigued, and the next year, she wrote a one-act play based on the description of The Last Cyclist; the play was presented in May 2010 as a staged reading at the synagogue.

(This wasn’t the English-language première of The Last Cyclist, however.  The play, in Patz’s adaptation, was performed in June 2009, its U.S. première, in St. Paul, Minnesota, by a consortium of organizations, including the Lex-Ham Community Theater, St. Paul Jewish Community Center, Czech and Slovak Cultural Center, Czech and Slovak Sokol Minnesota, Good Samaritan United Methodist Church of Edina, and Blank Slate Theater.)

Patz searched for Švenk’s original script to no avail; she learned of its loss during the Holocaust.  Later, however, she heard about an extant version of the play.  A Czech friend located a typed copy of the script in the library of the Theater Institute in Prague (Divadelní ústav, now called Institut umění – Divadelní ústav [IDU], the Arts and Theatre Institute) in 1999 and a colleague volunteered to make a rough translation of it.

Over the next several years, Patz edited and adapted her own version of The Last Cyclist from that translation.  She was surprised to find that the second act of the script as newly translated differed greatly from Šedová’s description in her 1965 essay.

That’s when Patz learned, upon some fast research, that the script on which her translation had been based wasn’t Švenk’s original, but a version of the play recreated from memory by Jana Šedová.  Patz wound up rewriting much of the second act to “restore” what she felt was Švenk’s original ending.

Once she knew there wasn’t an original script, it took Patz some time to determine what steps to take.  She consulted Šedova’s 1961 adaptation and her later description of the 1944 cabaret; examined architect, graphic artist, and stage and costume designer František Zelenka’s (1904-44) drawings for the costumes and sets for the original Terezin production; and searched out contemporaneous recollections of the play in books, and edited, reconstructed, and reimagined the translation of The Last Cyclist.

Among her most radical revisions, Patz cut or rewrote what she determined were Šedová’s interpolations into the 1961 production script.  Patz felt that these were accommodations for officially mandated Czech nationalism and pro-communism as well as the unofficial policy of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.  As Patz put it, “[T]his was about Šedová and her colleagues finding a way to make the play palatable to the Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia.”

(From her description of the scenes she removed, she sounds right.  The 1965 Rokoko mounting of The Last Cyclist was part of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia [KSČ].

(This was only a few years before the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent crushing of the movement by Soviet tanks.  Czech Jews in the earlier part of the decade were seeking ways to make Holocaust awareness part of Czech consciousness.  In the 1950s, it had been Czechoslovakian government policy to disenfranchise Jews and purge Jewish members of the KSČ.)

Patz also recast the play’s dialogue into more colloquial English and removed jokes and references to concentration-camp humor and life that she felt contemporary American audiences wouldn’t understand.  Further, in her original draft of the translation-cum-adaptation, Patz kept Šedová’s 1961 two-act format; however, she revised the script, which only runs about an hour-and-a-half, for performance without an intermission.

When a theater company director in the Cedar Grove area (there are several in Essex County) read her script, he remarked about the absence of Holocaust references in what he thought was a Holocaust play.  At Terezín, of course, the prisoners didn’t need reminding of the conditions under which they lived.  “There are joking allusions, but there’s nothing intrinsic to it,” said Patz.  It’s what the Terezin cabarets were for: to fight the constant reminders of the prisoners’ miseries and fears.

Patz realized, though, that the concentration camp was the context for both the humor and the horror of The Last Cyclist and the present-day American audience would need to feel that.  She felt she needed to find a way to express what the prisoners at Terezín lived with every day—but without adulterating the integrity of Švenk’s play as she saw it.

So she wrote opening and closing scenes, setting her version of the Švenk-Šedová script at Terezin on the night of the play’s dress rehearsal.  Her meta-theatrical adaptation of The Last Cyclist begins with a scene in which Jana Šedová, now an elderly survivor, reminisces about Karel Švenk.  (For the film adaptation, this scene became a voice-over narration by “Older Šedová,” spoken by Judy Blazer.) 

The space at La MaMa is configured as a thrust stage, very reminiscent of an Elizabethan theater.  It’s crude, however, and looks like it’s all homemade from rough wooden planks that might have been salvaged from used lumber or cannibalized from camp buildings. 

The rear of the raised playing area is a single-level, permanent façade with a door.  In this instance, the door can be slid left or right—in one sequence, it’s moved several times during the scene—and the traditional wall across the back of the stage is replaced by a curtain.

To the right and left of the platform are chairs in which members of the cast who are “off stage” sit, waiting to enter the action.  They’re entirely visible to the audience, both the one in the house and the viewers of the film.  These actors serve as additional voices to sweeten crowd or group noises and shouts.

At stage left is a small rack or shelf that holds scene cards on which the settings of each scene are written, such as “Horror Island” or “Zoo,” like in old-time vaudeville or burlesque theaters.  An actor leaving the stage on the left at the end of one scene removes the top card and slips it in the back of the stack to reveal the location of the next one.

As in traditional Elizabethan theaters, there’s no set; the location of each scene is identified only by the scene cards—and created by the viewer’s imagination.  Props are minimal and almost all of them are two-dimensional—there’s a flat schnaps bottle and a flat cactus plant in a flower pot, for instance—adding to the cartoon-like appearance and quality of the performance. 

Even the bicycles that are so significant to the production are 2-D, as if cut from thin plywood or cardboard.  They’re also unpainted and resemble very closely the bicycle in Mark Podwal’s opening credit-sequence animation.  I don’t know if the stage bikes were designed from the animation or vice-versa, but it was a clever touch.  (The set, or I should say, the environment, and the props were designed by Tom Lee.  The lighting was designed by Jeff Nash.)

This isn’t a low-tech production.  It’s a no-tech production.  Like the set, it all fits with the DIY nature of the production.

The costumes, designed by Ramona Ponce, are also simple, but somewhat more naturalistic than the props.  The characters are sort of divided into three categories: conventional comic figures (Bořivoj Abeles, Mánička), whose costumes and make-up are perfectly conventional as well; the Lunatics from the asylum, who wear white tattered pajamas and nightgowns and white-face make-up with black eye sockets; the townspeople, who are sort of in between the two “normal” characters and the Lunatics and wear ordinary clothing befitting their roles in the community and lightly whitened faces and less prominent black eye make-up.  (The hair and make-up were by Melissa Roth.)

In both the film and the stage versions of The Last Cyclist, the actors play multiple roles.  To differentiate among their characters, the actors don’t change costumes but they add bits, such as a sash, Ma’am’s black trench coat, or a hat.

[This concludes the first part of “The Last Cyclist.”  Please come back to ROT on Monday, 5 September, for the conclusion of my report on the concentration-camp play, including my assessment of the performance and the round-up of the press reception.]