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Train to Zakopane
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Edgemar Center for the Arts
Through March 29
Henry Jaglom, who turned his 2009 stage comedy Just 45 Minutes From Broadway into his 2012 film of the same name, isn’t the first auteur to use the live theater as a sort of dramatic workshop for his movie scripts. Late in his career, John Cassavetes likewise turned to the boards as a means of audience-testing scripts for future films. Given the radically different ontological demands of the stage and the screen, it’s anyone’s guess what the point behind such a practice might be. Perhaps, like the apparent rationale behind so much of L.A. theater, one does plays simply because, financially speaking, one still can.
Regardless, if ever there was a text begging to be put before the camera, it is playwright Jaglom’s Train to Zakopane. Based on a real-life incident that happened to Jaglom’s father in Poland between the world wars, the play’s period setting (abetted by Shayna Frederick’s elegant costumes), outdoor locales, naturalistic if formally cadenced dialogue, and bittersweet corker of a plot all suggest a picaresque European art house film of the Merchant-Ivory variety.
The time is 1928, and on a Polish train packed with returning Easter vacationers, chance results in an invitation for coach passenger Semyon Sapir (Mike Falkow) to join three fellow travelers — the priest Father Alexandrov (Stephen Howard), the former actress Nadia Selmeczy (the fine Cathy Arden), and the Polish army nurse Katia Wampusyk (Tanna Frederick) — and share the comfort of their first-class compartment.
Semyon is a cultured and successful businessman from Danzig, the son of an affluent Russian family that lost everything during the Bolshevik Revolution. Unbeknownst to his compartment-mates, he is also Jewish. Jaglom puts this fact to dramatic-ironic use as the largely expository Act 1 reveals the deep-set religious prejudice of the passengers, even as it sets the backdrop of the rising tide of European anti-Semitism that will eventually culminate in the Holocaust.
The most fiercely fanatical and outspoken of the lot proves to be Katia, a former peasant that bitterly blames the Jews for her father’s business failure and suicide. Nevertheless, she is smitten with the dashing Semyon, who convinces the nurse to get off the train with him for a romantic adventure at the Polish ski-resort town of Zakopane, where Act 2 reveals both of them to be rather fantastically linked in a coincidentally shared history of personal tragedy.
Although still somewhat tentative in its opening weekend, director Gary Imhoff’s deliberately paced production — which includes some awkwardly lengthy scenery changes of designer Chris Stone’s unwieldy Art Deco train and luxury-hotel sets — uses his cast to good effect. Falkow’s nicely restrained performance as Semyon endows the character with the requisite air of romantic mystery essential to the story’s suspense, while Howard’s venially tippling priest lends effective notes of comedy. Kelly DeSarla and Jeff Elam both provide solid character support in the second act.
The most challenging performance is Frederick’s, whose abrupt shifts between Katia’s ugly outbursts of anti-Semitic bigotry and the more appealing characteristics suitable to the heroine of a love story are uneasy at best. By trying to be both a romance as well as a broader exploration of the moral complicity of assimilated Jews, who attempted to avoid persecution by passing as Christians, Train to Zakopane ultimately ends up satisfying neither.
Edgemar Center for the Arts, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica; Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. (no perfs. Dec. 21-Jan. 8); through March 29. (310) 392-7327, www.edgemarcenter.org.
