From FORTUNE’S FOOL THEATRE: www.fortunesfooltheatre.org
FORTUNE’S FOOL MOUNTS NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE OF KIRA OBOLENSKY PLAY
Fortune’s Fool Theatre will present the North American premiere and first theatrical run of WHY WE LAUGH, by Kira Obolensky, September 12-27, Open Eye Figure Theatre, 506 East 24th Street, Minneapolis MN 55404. The production features music by Craig Harris, is directed by Hayley Finn, and will be performed by Julie Kurtz, Elise Langer, Ryan Lindberg, and Skyler Nowinski. Harris will serve as musical director and accompanist.
WHY WE LAUGH is a new adaptation of Laugh with Us!, an original cabaret by Felix Porges, Vítězslav Horpatzky, Pavel Weisskopf and Pavel Stránský; English translation & dramaturgy by Lisa Peschel.
Laugh with Us! was written and performed in 1944 in the World War II Jewish Ghetto at Terezín, just 40 miles northwest of Prague.
The cabaret, complete with its original sheet music, came to light in the spring of 2005 in two separate family archives. The original cabaret is set in a postwar Prague identical to the beloved city the Czech Jews remembered from the late 1930s. In playwright Kira Obolensky’s new adaptation, characters based on the original Terezín performers encounter “the scholar,” a theater historian from our present. As the performers look forward to the postwar future and the scholar looks back toward their past, they confront each other with difficult questions: Why did the Terezín prisoners laugh, and what does that laughter mean to us today?
Performance dates are September 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20*, 24, 25, 26, 27. Performances are at 8:00 pm, Sunday matinees(*) at 2:00 pm. Admission is $20 general; $15 for students, seniors, and MN Fringe button holders. Thursday nights (September 17 & 24) are “pay what you can.” Tickets are available through Open Eye Figure Theatre, www.openeyetheatre.org, or through Brown Paper Tickets, brownpapertickets.com.
We will hold two special postshow events. On September 13, after the 2 p.m. matinee, Dr. Lisa Peschel, the scholar who discovered and translated the cabaret texts (they are collected in the book Performing Captivity, Performing Escape) will deliver a brief talk. Entitled “Translating Terezín,” it will be the story of Peschel’s search for the meaning of the text—how, with the aid of survivors she cracked the code of the slang and inside jokes to capture the prisoners’ unique, resilient sense of humor. A question and answer period will follow.
On September 24, we will hold a panel discussion, “The Road to Terezín,” after the 8 p.m. performance. The playwright, composer, director, and actors will discuss the process of developing this work and of performing it at the Terezín Ghetto in 2011, where the audience included Ghetto survivors and the last living author of Laugh with Us!
Production of Why We Laugh is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund; and by a grant from RIMON: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council. Peschel’s talk is sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Austrian Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, and Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.