Why We Laugh

By Lisa Peschel

The notion of ‘co-textual’ performance is a concept we have borrowed from literary critic Stephen Greenblatt. Rather than treating a work of art and its context as ‘figure and ground’, we regard them as inextricably intertwined. Many of the works we are researching are so specific to their time and place that it is difficult to interpret them or appreciate their full significance if they are performed on their own. Rather than following the more traditional format of pre-show lecture then performance, however, we aim to incorporate the history of the work into the performance itself. In this way spectators can enjoy the aesthetic experience of immersion in the work while also gaining the knowledge to engage with it both intellectually and emotionally.

Why We Laugh was created by Minneapolis playwright Kira Obolensky, in collaboration with director Hayley Finn and composer Craig Harris, and was based on the research of PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel, who discovered the cabaret in the possession of survivors and their heirs in 2005. Kira’s main challenge was to take a work that was written for the ultimate ‘insider’ audience – a cabaret written by Terezín prisoners for their fellow prisoners – and make it accessible for today’s spectators.

Photo by Aliza Rand

The structure of the original Czech-language cabaret was ideally suited to engage its Terezín audience. Laugh with Us is a full-length cabaret featuring comic duo Felix Porges and Pidla Horpatzky as hosts and eight additional performers who present songs, dances, and other musical numbers. The cabaret opens in the present of the ghetto with a greeting from Porges and a welcome song from his wife and fellow performer Elly Bernstein that ends with the line ‘Let a happy end befall you, one and all’. Then something quite remarkable happens: they perform that happy end. The rest of the cabaret is set in their imagined version of postwar Prague. Porges and Horpatzky visit theatres and concert halls all over the city—places their audiences would have remembered from their beloved prewar Prague—and watch their fellow survivors perform in the most prestigious venues. The entire time they ‘reminisce’ about the ‘good old days’ in Terezín, creating comic versions of some of the most shocking events that took place in the ghetto.

While this structure would have captivated Terezín spectators who knew Prague well and longed to return, present-day audiences needed more information both about prewar Prague and the ghetto itself.   To provide this, Kira made some decisions that established a new structure for the script. She created the character of ‘the scholar’—a researcher based loosely on Lisa Peschel who guides the spectators through the play—and characters based on Porges, Bernstein and Horpatzky, who speak to the audience from the present of the ghetto. She also incorporated testimony from Peschel’s interviews with survivors of the cultural life. All of these allowed her to introduce historical information and the prisoner’s and survivors’ points of view regarding the cabaret.

To raise the emotional stakes of the play, Kira gave the Scholar and the cabaret performers a goal in the present. One thing that intrigued her was the fact that the prisoners were trying to imagine themselves into the postwar future, and Peschel was trying to imagine herself into their wartime past. What would happen if they met?   So she created a structure in which the boundaries of time are fluid and both sides pursue their own goals. The Scholar searches for an answer to the question: what did the humor in the cabaret mean to the prisoners, and how can we understand that today? But once the performers realize that she knows their fates, can they bring themselves to ask—and can she bring herself to tell them? This approach transforms the audiences’ relationship to these historical characters: they become individuals in the present, facing an unknown future and trying to cope with any means available to them, including their own sense of humor.

At a recent staging of Why We Laugh in Minneapolis, performance studies scholar Sonja Kuftinec shared a sentiment that she hoped audiences would take from the play. Impressed by the prisoners’ ability to exercise agency through performance even with their radically limited resources, she hoped that we would draw inspiration to perform our own acts of agency, taking advantage of all the resources available to us and our own freedom to take action regarding the crises of our own present.

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Laugh with Us performance at the 'Out of the Shadows' festival in Madison, 30 Aug 2015. Songs, scenes and sketches performed by artists Ryan Lindberg, Sara Richardson, and musical director and pianist Craig Harris.