'The Last Cyclist' – Part 2

 

[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.

'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.]