Ethan Slater cowrote and stars as a famous French mime in Marcel on the Train (photo by Emilio Madrid)
MARCEL ON THE TRAIN
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $66-$136
www.classicstage.org
In his 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, cowriter-director Roberto Benigni portrays a Jewish Italian bookstore owner who protects his young son from the horrors of the Holocaust and a concentration camp by bravely performing silent, physical comedy for him. Although fictional, the movie was inspired by the real experiences of Italian author Rubino Romeo Salmonì in Auschwitz. Life Is Beautiful was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, for Best Music, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Actor.
In Marcel on the Train, making its world premiere at Classic Stage, cowriter Ethan Slater portrays Jewish French mime Marcel Marceau, who was part of the resistance during WWII, joining with his cousin Georges Loinger and the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants) to help save Jewish children, bravely performing silent, physical comedy for them as they tried to escape the Nazis. However, Marcel on the Train sputters, a bumpy ride that loses gas while sharing its remarkable tale.
The hundred-minute play opens with the twenty-year-old Marceau — born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, son of a Polish kosher butcher and Ukraine-born mother — performing mime on a bare wooden platform stage. He plucks a flower and follows some butterflies before a train whistle blows, several benches rise up from the floor, and he is joined by four hungry, tired children disguised as boy scouts: the serious, intelligent Berthe (Tedra Millan), the knowledgeable but cynical Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore), the talkative Henri (Alex Wyse), and Etiennette (Maddie Corman), who never speaks.
“Sorry. I was having a dream,” Berthe says to Marcel. “I’ve had it before, I think. It’s the future and everyone I know is old. But I’m twelve still because I never got to get old.” Marcel can’t hear her because of the train noise, so he mimics slamming the window shut, then makes a joke that Berthe doesn’t laugh at. “Don’t worry, I have others,” he promises. The exchange sets the tone for the show, which explores the loss of childhood innocence, communication between children and adults, and courage in the fight against fascism.
Marcel Marceau (Ehan Slater) entertains four adolescents as they try to escape the Nazis in fictionalized play (photo by Emilio Madrid)
The drama switches, sometimes awkwardly, to the past and the future. The first such time shift is told from the point of view of Georges (Aaron Serotsky), who tells Marcel, who is expertly forging documents for the cause, “Ooh, we’d be fucked without you, cousin. . . . Your artistry is a gift.” Marcel replies, “I am gifting the resistance my skill, my attention to detail, not my artistry. Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t just forge thirty identification papers, he’d turn them into, I don’t know, thirty baby ducks farting on Hitler.” (Ouch.)
They design a plan to meet up in Roanne, then make their way through the woods into Switzerland. Back in the present, Marceau mimes juggling apples to keep the four twelve-year-olds’ minds off their dire situation. A second trip to the past introduces Marcel’s father, Charles, (Serotsky), who is not thrilled by his son’s heroic exploits. “You know what you should do? Return to Warsaw, play the Grand, could you imagine?” Charles says, but Marcel is determined to be part of the resistance, even as the present-day journey grows more serious when they discover Georges is not waiting for them at Roanne and a Nazi officer (Serotsky) is approaching on the train.
Marcel on the Train, begins and ends with Marceau alone, miming to the audience; the emotional impact has changed because of what has happened in between, but it feels outside of the play. While it’s a showcase for Slater’s talent and virtuosity as Marceau’s alter ego, Bip the Clown, both frame pieces go on too long. Tony nominee Slater (SpongeBob SquarePants, Wicked) and cowriter and director Marshall Pailet (Private Jones, Who’s Your Baghdaddy) never find quite the right track for the narrative, which presents a surprising, relatively new, and utterly fascinating part of Marceau’s life to explore, previously detailed in several books and films over the last fifteen years, including Jonathan Jakubowicz’s fictionalized 2020 Resistance, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Marceau.
The pace stops and starts and gets caught up in tangents that are difficult to recover from, and the tension is overly manufactured. Jill BC DuBoff’s sound, Studio Luna’s lighting, and Sarah Laux’s costumes create the right atmosphere on Scott Davis’s spare set, but adult actors Corman (Accidentally Brave), Millan (Leopoldstadt), Moore (Tammy Faye), and Wyse (Good Night, Oscar) are hamstrung as the four adolescents by the inconsistent dialogue, as is Serotsky (August: Osage County), who plays everyone else.
Marceau and his brother and cousin were members of the French resistance, rescuing children, but the play has been fictionalized into disparate elements that don’t form a solid whole. There’s a great story to be told, but unfortunately Marcel on the Train too often gets diverted as it shows that life can also not be beautiful.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]