It’s easy to see how the dynamic physical performer Ethan Slater, Broadway’s SpongeBob and Hollywood’s Boq, would be drawn to the irresistible true story of the world’s most famous mime having been an active member in the French Resistance. Marcel Marceau smuggled dozens of Jewish children to safety in Switzerland, using his skills as an entertainer to keep them calm and quiet during the long train rides. In “Marcel on the Train” Slater portrays Marceau using some of the same skills Marceau perfected, even reproducing some of the mime’s most famous routines – Catching a Butterfly, Walking Against the Wind. But “Marcel on the Train,” which Slater co-wrote with its director Marshall Pailet, works better as a showcase than a drama.
Their play focuses on a single (imagined) train ride, with Marcel escorting four feisty 12-year-olds, each portrayed by an adult. In a couple of flashback scenes, we learn that he was born Marcel Mangel, the Jewish son of a Ukrainian mother and a father from Poland who works as a kosher butcher, changing his name to the more French-sounding Marceau as a matter of survival in Nazi-occupied France. His father (portrayed, like many of the single-scene characters, by Aaron Serotsky) refuses Marcel’s entreaty to escape with the children to Switzerland, and we eventually learn that he was sent to a concentration camp. His cousin Georges (also Serotsky) enlisted him into the Jewish resistance organization OSE.
There are also some flashforwards, where we are shown what each of the four children will be like as adults in the future, which vary from satiric to surreal.
But the frame of the play is the train ride, and the longer it went on, the more it felt to me like a children’s adventure story, albeit one not suitable for children. (The production is recommended for age 13+.) This is largely, I think, because the dialogue is neither as natural nor as precise as the physical movement, and because each of the children is a type. Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore) and Henri (Alex Wyse) are always trading insults. Berthe (Tedra Millan) is a sourpuss that Marcel is always trying to win over. Etienette (Maddie Corman) is a gamin who doesn’t speak; she mimes. We are told these are all orphans; Berthe’s pessimism seems well-earned – she talks about the murder of “my father, my brother, and just last week my mom” – which makes Marcel’s campaign to get her to find his jokes funny, and generally to like him, feel a tad…narcissistic? (Is this the playwrights’ intent?)
There is a 2020 movie about Marceau’s war-time exploits entitled “Resistance,” starring Jesse Eisenberg. I thought of it at the end of an extended scene of suspense in “Marcel on the Train” when the Nazis are going train car by train car, and one (Serotsky again) finally enters their train compartment, to inspect their (forged) papers and ask questions of Marcel and the children. It’s surely meant to be a terrifying, edge-of-your-seat scene, but the Nazi’s behavior is so illogical that it feels inspired by action movies rather than historical events.
What helps “Marcel on the Train” feel aligned with history, paradoxically, is the design, which is largely abstract. But Studio Luna’s shadowy lighting, and Scott Davis’ set design of a train car, evoked for me the genuinely scary times in which Marcel Marceau lived, which makes it all the more striking that he decided to take action.
Marcel on the Train
Classic Stage Company through March 22
Tickets: $66 – $136
Running time: 100 minutes no intermission
Written by Marshall P
Scott Davis (Set Design), Sarah Laux (Costume Design), Studio Luna (Lighting Design), Jill BC DuBoff (Sound Design), and Geoff Josselson (Casting).ailet and Ethan Slater
Directed by Pailet
Cast: Ethan Slater as Marcel, Maddie Corman Etiennette, Tedra Millan as Berthe, Max Gordon Moore as Adolphe, Aaron Serotsky as “Everyone Else”, and Alex Wyse as Henri
