Pen pals become enemies in WJT’s epistolary play By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:50 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 10, 2024

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This article was published 10/04/2024 (864 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the first day of rehearsals for Address Unknown, director Dan Petrenko gave his cast and crew paper, pens and envelopes.

The assignment? Write a letter to another person working on the epistolary drama in order to get into the mindset of the two correspondents at the production’s heart — a pair of Weimar Era business partners divided by a chasm of propaganda.

It was a smart opening move by the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s artistic director, transporting the creative team of the final production of the 2023-24 season to a moment in time when communicators didn’t have the luxury of immediacy, and facts were twisted into fatal falsehoods along their delivery routes.

It was a technique to help the show’s two actors, Arne MacPherson and Amitai Kedar, wrap their heads around their characters, longtime friends who run a gallery.

“Every time we did an exercise like that, we learned something I hadn’t thought of before about the situation or the relationship,” says MacPherson, a frequent WJT actor who plays the gentile Martin to Kedar’s Jewish Max.

Amid the rapid onset of war and widespread hatred, the relationship between those two characters is complicated to say the least. With one gallerist in Germany and the other in San Francisco, the two find themselves separated by a gulf that only the postal service can span.

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Petrenko, 25, selected this show because as he was prepping for this season, his first full year programming for the WJT, he was reminded of its potency as several relationships around him disintegrated over political disagreements.

“I knew that this was a story worth telling right now, and since programming it over a year ago, I think it’s become more timely,” he says.

Penned in the 1930s by American writer Kathrine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown was first published in a 1938 edition of Story magazine. According to Kressman Taylor’s personal papers, both her husband and her editor suggested leaving her first name off the byline, for fear the content was “too strong to appear under the name of a woman.”

The work, an epistolary novel, earned rave reviews upon its publication in 1938. It’s only notable pan came courtesy of the Third Reich, which banned the novel — a plaudit for any anti-fascist piece of art.

When the novel was translated to Hebrew by Asher Tarmon and adapted for the stage by Avi Malka, Kressman Taylor’s original work received a wave of new interest, with the Guardian declaring it “shockingly potent” after a 2013 run at London’s Soho Theatre.

“It was so prescient when it was written, and the author was observing what was happening in Germany, maybe reflecting that nothing ever changes,” says MacPherson. “This cycle of hate speech which becomes propaganda is as old as civilization, as old as humankind.”

For Kedar, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, the play is a serious piece of commentary, standing starkly in opposition to what he views as a growing movement of denial and historical disinformation surrounding the Holocaust.

“It’s very important to do this piece, not just for Jewish audiences, but for non-Jews, just to know that it happens and can happen again,” he says.

Kedar’s most prominent acting credit came in 2015, when he was cast as a Sonderkommando (member of a prisoner work group) in Son of Saul, Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes’ gonzo docudrama set within a concentration camp, shot from the shakey perspective of a man at the centre of the inferno.

“I go to Budapest to film this movie, and I don’t hear afterwards, and I thought they cancelled it. Sometimes you make a movie and it doesn’t turn out, so it never comes to the world,” he says, wearing a yellow ribbon on his lapel to commemorate the victims of the massacre in Israel last October, which spurred the ongoing war.

“Then I got an invitation six months later to Cannes, and then to the Oscars.”

At that ceremony, Nemes’ film was awarded the prize for Best Foreign Language Film.

“In this play, you get this thing where someone is speaking their innermost thoughts to their best friend in a way we never do when we’re just speaking to one another.”–Arne MacPherson

That movie is starkly different from the text of Address Unknown, which operates from a temporal remove and — similar to the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest — draws its power from separation, showing how trauma and hatred seep into human relationships.

“In this play, you get this thing where someone is speaking their innermost thoughts to their best friend in a way we never do when we’re just speaking to one another,” says MacPherson, who saw parallels between Kressman Taylor’s novel and Naomi Klein’s recent social media expose, Doppelganger.

“It explores, in a way I find very cogent, what is happening right now with the way hate speech and propaganda can take fire, especially in the era of social media, and the way people can become entrenched in those beliefs.”

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For Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, this show is a crucial one. Earlier this spring, following a sold-out run of the Kanye West-centric musical Pain to Power, Petrenko was forced by financial concern for the company’s future to cancel Songs for a New World, which would otherwise have been the season’s closing production.

That move shifted Address Unknown into the all-important final slot, adding even more heft to the production than its political undertones already promised. Early returns on ticket sales were strong, Petrenko says. And on opening night, when the cast and crew unseal their envelopes, they will do so ahead of the arrival of a nearly sold-out crowd.

In the lobby throughout the entire run will be a working typewriter, giving audience members the chance to write letters of their own.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com