Jakob Cansler

By Jakob Cansler

This article was originally published in DC Theater Arts here.

It was only ten or so minutes into On the Far End when I heard the first “wow” from an audience member. It was whispered, sounding almost of disbelief. Just before, we had heard the story of a man who had walked the Trail of Tears as a child, one of only 50 to survive in a group that originally totaled around 500.

His story made it to the stage at Round House Theatre indirectly. In that moment of the play, Mary Kathryn Nagle, writer and performer of the one-woman show, is embodying her mother-in-law, Jean Hill Chaudhuri, who is in turn re-enacting her grandfather telling the story.

The direct and indirect embodiment of memories is an important aspect of On the Far End, now playing as part of Round House’s National Capital New Play Festival through May 7. Equal parts heart-rending and inspiring, Nagle’s play is powerful, even if its straightforward structure holds the play back from reaching its full potential impact.

On the Far End is, essentially, the life of Jean Hill Chaudhuri, a Muscogee leader. Nagle performs as Jean, walking us through her mother-in-law’s history in the first person. Jean recounts growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma, being forcibly taken to a Native boarding school, running away from that school, encountering constant racism and discrimination, and becoming an activist and advocate for Indigenous rights.

The title, it should be noted, comes from a Supreme Court ⁠— “your Supreme Court,” as Jean says ⁠— decision. “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise,” reads the opening line of the majority opinion of McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020). The Court rarely kept its promises to Indigenous people, Jean reminds us, but this case reversed that trend, with the Court ruling that the Muscogee Nation had jurisdiction over its own reservation and that the state of Oklahoma did not.

If the promise on the far end of the Trail of Tears wasn’t truly fulfilled until 2020, then Jean’s story is of someone who fought her whole life to inch closer to fulfilling that promise. Indeed, she refers back to that theme as she moves, chronologically, from story to story throughout her life.

To be frank, though, Nagle could actually stand to hammer in those themes even more. On the Far End’s straightforward, chronological nature means that what is missing in the play is connective tissue⁠, something to tie the play’s individual moments together and connect Jean’s stories to broader issues. We certainly get a strong sense of who Jean was and what made her so extraordinary, but less of a sense of the insight these stories could bring.

Still, despite the structural issues, On the Far End is compelling from start to finish, mostly thanks to Nagle’s writing and performance. She tells Jean’s story with a unique blend of embodiment, storytelling, and oration. Nagle never fully becomes Jean, but that choice feels purposeful, like a constant reminder that this is a story being passed down as much as it is a performance. 

As directed by Margot Bordelon, Nagle also exhibits a particular knack for cadence, which keeps the play engaging, and evocative delivery, which makes Jean’s story come to life in the audience’s head. I could visualize Jean as she ran away from school, and that image was even more powerful than a recreation would have been.

The design elements assist in those particular tricks. Emma Deane’s lighting design utilizes subtle, barely noticeable shifts to enhance the tone of each story, while sound design by Emily Duncan Wilson is deployed in specific times to add to the most evocative moments. Paige Hathaway’s scenic design, meanwhile, gives Nagle plenty of variable space to move but can fade into the background when the story’s weight is enough in its own right.

The weight of the play, it is worth noting, is never lost on anyone. At one point, Jean tells the story of her own turn as a playwright. She worked with other Indigenous artists to create a performance in Oklahoma about the Trail of Tears, in hopes that confronting the experience through art would help the community to put it behind them. 

In many ways, On the Far End has, understandably, the opposite goal.  Here, Jean’s story is told with the goal of remembering her experiences, not to put the past behind, but to use it to drive forward. This is a story that demands to be heard and passed on.

Indeed, that demand permeated the audience on opening night ⁠— an audience that included many members of Muscogee Nation, including Principal Chief David Hill, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020).McGirt, after all, inspired Nagle to write On the Far End, and although that opinion was in many ways a promise fulfilled, this play serves as a reminder that the story of how Muscogee Nation got there isn’t done being told.

By Jakob Cansler

This article was first published in DC Theater Arts here.

It would seem, on the surface, that the plays in 4615 Theatre Company’s double bill could not be more different. One centers on a queer couple who just begun living together. The other, on two friends taking a boat out to sea.

Below the surface, though, both paper backs and Life Jacket, now performing at The Writer’s Center through February 26, have a lot in common. Both are premieres. Both speak to similar, and compelling, themes. And both ask of audiences exceptional attention.

paper backs by Tristan B. Willis, the first of the double bill, features a queer couple ⁠— named only The Writer (Caro Dubberly) and The Artist (Jessica Ludd) ⁠— who have just moved in together. Through a series of short scenes connected by poetic monologues, we watch as a rift forms in their once-strong relationship and connection turns to disconnection.

Their respective art forms are, in a tragically ironic sense, the biggest driver of that disconnect. The Writer struggles to understand The Artist’s art. The Artist struggles to understand the Writer’s literature. That failure to connect over their passions drives a wedge between them. After all, these are people whose art is their identities ⁠— it is how they express their emotions, their understanding, their connection with the other. To fail to connect over art is to fail to connect over identity.

Willis navigates this theme in compelling fashion, but the language of the play does perhaps more to hinder than help. The monologues and dialogue alike utilize an elevated language that is at once blunt and enigmatic, requiring a level of constant analysis to be understood.

And yet, understanding what is being said in paper backs is much less important than understanding what isn’t. That is where the directing, acting, and design choices shine through. Through subtle movements, Director Stevie Zimmerman’s staging brings the subtext of the deepening conflict between these two characters to life, while Ludd’s performance in particular complements the direction with an impressive emotional range. Jordan Friend’s soundtrack and Pierce Stonburner’s stirring lighting evoke the emotional arc of the characters as their alienation from one another grows.

As a result, paper backs in many ways punches above its weight. The same could be said of the second play in 4615’s two-part performance.

Life Jacket, written by Caridad Svich, centers on two adult friends, played by Jonathan Del Palmer and Eamon Patrick Walsh, from a small oceanside town, who go out on a boat as they do every Sunday. Normally, their ritual involves a quiet day on the water drinking PBR. This time, though, things go differently, as a combination of fighting, stormy weather, and a spiritual encounter (that may or may not be real) makes their trip increasingly tumultuous. That experience drives them apart and together simultaneously.

Svich’s writing in Life Jacket is unique, constantly blending traditional dialogue with fourth-wall-breaking narration, memories, and fantasies. This chaotic structure makes for a text that is fascinating but difficult at first to find an entry point into, as the characters move between the main action of the play to monologues to memories and back so quickly that it is difficult to keep up. As a result, there are plenty of moments when trying to understand what is going on distracts from, well, what is going on.

And what is going on is poignant. Life Jacket could be considered ⁠— much like a certain famous boat-based novel that is referenced throughout the play ⁠— to be a metaphor. The experience of the characters, real and potentially not real, speaks both to the universal feeling of isolation and the specific need for connection at this moment in time.

Here, as in paper backs, the directing and design choices are important in helping the audience navigate those themes. Director Friend, playing double-duty here, provides a staging that sometimes feels arbitrary at first but always ends up elevating the themes of the text.

Similarly, Stonburner’s lighting in Life Jacket gets increasingly striking as the action gets increasingly chaotic, while also creating visual cues to help traverse the play’s blend of storytelling formats. Sarah Beth Hall’s scenic design ⁠— which involves a floor of repurposed wood, moveable crates, and clouds made of fish nets ⁠— evokes both the rickety boat the characters set out on and the imagination the play seems to live in.

In fact, it is Hall’s scenic design that most effectively ties this double bill together. The two directors use the space Hall has designed differently, but the cohesive aesthetic, which works equally well for both paper backs and Life Jacket, creates an immediate mental connection between the two plays. They may tell different stories, but they utilize the same building blocks.Indeed, paper backs and Life Jacket are at once contrasting and complementary. Both require the audience to dig deep into the work, but promise a payoff for those who do. For both, I would argue, the payoff is worth it.

By Jakob Cansler

This article was first published in DC Theater Arts: here.

Prologue Theatre is on a mission.

“We want the plays that Prologue produces to be a catalyst for deeper dialogue and conversation on topical issues,” said Artistic Director Jason Tamborini shortly after the company was founded. Prologue’s latest production, in association with NextStop Theatre Company, certainly attempts to fit that bill.

Now in performances at Atlas Performing Arts Center before moving to NextStop next month, The Cake by Bekah Brunstetter is also on a mission. In this case, though, that mission is too heavy-handed to be successful.

The Cake centers on Della (Nicole Halmos), a conservative Christian baker in North Carolina who is set to be a contestant on the fictional competition series Big American Bake-Off. She faces an internal conflict, perhaps the first real one of her life, when Jen (Tara Forseth), a woman she practically helped raise, asks her to bake a cake. Specifically, a cake for Jen’s wedding. Specifically, Jen’s wedding to another woman.

Based on that description, it may seem like The Cake’s goal is one in support of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights more broadly. Indeed, throughout the play, Della explicitly debates the topic with the other characters. She seeks some level of understanding about being queer from Jen. She debates furtively about politics with Jen’s bride, Macy (Sabrina Lynne Sawyer). She discusses the biblical arguments with her husband, Tim (Sam Lunay), a plumber who is much more set in his beliefs and expects Della to fall in line with him.

What this makes for is essentially a 90-minute rundown of the major points for and against same-sex marriage. Perhaps if it was performed for a different audience, The Cake would indeed seem primarily a pro-LGBTQ play. In front of a liberal-leaning, DC-based audience, though, Brunstetter’s mission is less about convincing people like Della to support same-sex marriage and more about convincing people who are decidedly not like Della that Della is not a hostile adversary.

In fact, Della is painted from the beginning as a well-intentioned hero whom the audience can root for to do the right thing. Halmos portrays Della’s complexities with ease, creating a funny and engaging character whose humanity the audience can understand.

Halmos’ Della is, however, one of the few things that are effective about Brunstetter’s mission in this play. The most obvious issue is The Cake’s over-reliance on surface-level ideas and clichés to make its points.

The other characters, for instance, do not have nearly the complexity that Della does. Jen, Macy, and Tim all exist to fulfill specific narrative purposes and, as a result, seem like two-dimensional stereotypes ⁠— Jen, the small-town girl discovering herself; Macy, the big-city liberal; Tim, the stubborn blue-collar conservative. Forseth, Sawyer, and Lunay do the best they can with a poor hand, but the way these characters are written makes for dialogue that feels like talking points.

Therein lies the overarching struggle of The Cake: there is simply a lot more telling than showing, and as a result, the multifaceted themes at play ⁠— like how our views are molded by religion, class, geography, etc. ⁠— end up oversimplified.

That The Cake’s points might be ineffective would not be much of an issue if the play still worked as a piece of entertainment, but unfortunately, because Brunstetter’s goals are so overstated, the purpose ends up dragging down the rest of the script with it. The pacing, dialogue, and structure all suffer from a lack of subtlety that makes it difficult to become engrossed in the world of the play.

To be sure, none of what makes The Cake ineffective comes on the part of Prologue or the artistic team. Aria Velz’s direction takes what could be a heavy production and makes it feel springy, and Tamborini’s scenic design ⁠— which features bedroom tableaus that appear from behind walls⁠ — makes for both an intriguing visual and an impressive use of a small space.

There is also, notably, one aspect of The Cake that does manage to conceal many of the script’s issues: humor. Despite the gravitas of the themes, The Cake never takes itself too seriously, which helps to break up the pacing. Brunstetter has a particular skill for deploying punchlines at just the right time so moments that could become cumbersome are lightened. The entire cast, especially Halmos, nails that timing consistently. Still, at the end of the day, The Cake is a play on a mission, and one that is not successful.

That being said, Prologue Theatre is also on a mission ⁠— to start conversations ⁠— and I’ll admit that after seeing The Cake, I did have a riveting conversation with a friend about these issues. In that sense and in this case, Prologue’s mission could be called a success.

By Jakob Cansler

This article was first published in DC Theater Arts here.

On Saturday evening, January 21, nearly nine years after beginning work on its first iteration, Georgetown professor Derek Goldman introduced a preview screening of Remember This, a new film based on the play of the same name that began right here in Washington, DC.

Remember This tells the true story of Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government-in-exile during World War II who survived the Blitzkrieg and witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust. He took his eyewitness reports to the British Foreign Secretary and President Roosevelt when there was still time to intervene. Needless to say, they did not.

As in the stage production, the film version of Remember This raises questions of personal responsibility and moral courage through a solo performance by Academy Award nominee David Stratharin, who portrays Karski.

“All of us have been fueled at each turn by our sense that Karski’s story is urgently relevant for our current moment, that this is as much a current events project as a historical one,” Goldman said at Shakespeare Theatre, in front of a sold-out crowd that included the Polish Ambassador to the U.S., members of the creative team who had worked on both the stage production and the film, and former students of Jan Karski.

Now, Karski’s story exists permanently in the film Remember This, which has so far been selected for and won awards at numerous film festivals, will play in theaters nationwide, and will be featured as part of PBS’ “Great Performances” series later this year.

But while Remember This now has a global reach that includes a stage production, a film, a course curriculum, and a book, it began locally, with a one-off show at Georgetown University.

The year was 2014. Goldman had been asked to create a theater project about Jan Karski. He reached out to Clark Young, a former student, to collaborate on the project.

“He [Goldman] asked me to join partially because I was living in his basement at the time, and partially because he thought I had something to offer,” Young joked during the screening’s post-show discussion. “My first question was: ‘Who was Jan Karski?’ And I learned that I’ve been walking by his statue for four years and never bothered to even stop and look.”

That statue sits on Georgetown’s campus ⁠— similar statues are also in New York City, Warsaw, Krakow, and Tel Aviv ⁠— where Karski was a professor in the School of Foreign Service from 1952 to 1992.

During that time, his story wasn’t well-known. In fact, Karksi didn’t tell his story publicly until 1981, when he served as the keynote speaker at the International Liberators Conference, a gathering in Washington, DC, for concentration camp liberators to record their testimonies.

After his death in 2000, though, the movement to make his story known to the world picked up steam, culminating in the Karski Centennial Celebration in 2014. The original version of Remember This, originally titled My Report to the World, was created for that centennial through Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, a program, co-founded by Goldman in 2012, that encourages Georgetown theater students to engage in international politics.

“We created a piece with [Strathairn] and an ensemble of Georgetown students that then took on a bit of a life of its own,” said Young in an interview. “We were invited to Warsaw. We worked there. We had a residency with the Museum of Jewish Heritage.”

It wasn’t until 2019 that My Report to the World became Remember This ⁠— now a one-person show ⁠— which performed at Georgetown for the centennial of the School of Foreign Service.

From there, the show performed, in collaboration with Human Rights Watch, for one night only in January 2020 in London. That’s where Eva Anisko, a film producer, saw it.

“I was deeply affected by the performance,” Anisko said after the recent screening. “It was so in my core that I just felt everyone has to experience this.” Immediately after seeing it, she reached out to Goldman about a potential film.

Meanwhile, Remember This was set for a series of international performances in 2020. Those performances were not to be ⁠— the pandemic put the play on the shelf but cleared the way to film that summer.

Since then, the reach of Remember This has only grown. Strathairn has performed the play in DC, Chicago, and New York City over the past two years. In 2021, Georgetown University Press published a copy of the script alongside essays by leading thinkers including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, among others.

Now, after a run at festivals, the film is set for its premiere on January 27, to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day, in theaters across the U.S. ⁠— in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and more ⁠— and on PBS’ Great Performances on March 13.

Meanwhile, the team is still committed to continuing with the stage production. Over the next two weeks, it will be performed in four different cities in Poland.

“I think that ultimately the goal is for this thing to be seen by as many people as possible, as we feel that the story is so urgently important,” said Young.

Indeed, every member of the team has echoed a similar sentiment ⁠— that Jan Karski’s story is so remarkable and so resonant that they feel compelled to continue telling it. As a result, what started as a one-off performance at Georgetown seen by a small number of people has grown into something much bigger, experienced by tens of thousands of people all around the world.

“Every once in a while, David, Derek, and myself … we kind of look at each other and say, ‘can you believe it?’” Young said. “I think if you told us [in 2014], there would be few things more rewarding than to hear that this story will be seen and experienced by many, many people.”

by Jakob Cansler

This article was first published in DC Theater Arts here.

It is fair, I think, to assume that for the vast majority of Americans, the stakes of learning a foreign language are low. It is rarely something to lose sleep over ⁠— a necessity only insomuch as it fulfills graduation or career requirements.

For many others around the world, though, learning English is a high-stakes affair, and one that comes at a cost. The play English, now in performances at Studio Theatre, makes that cost crystal clear.

Written by in-demand playwright Sanaz Toossi and directed by Knud Adams ⁠(who also directed the original New York production last year), English centers on four students studying for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, in Karaj, Iran, in 2009. Their specific reasons for taking the test vary. Elham (Tara Grammy) needs a high score to go to medical school in Australia. Roya (Nina Ameri) would like to live with her son and granddaughter in Canada. Omid (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) says he wants a green card so he can move to the U.S. For all, learning English is the key to their next step in life.

Teaching them is Marjan (Nazanin Nour), who lived in England for nine years but has moved back to Iran. In many ways, though, she is more than a teacher for them. She is also a guide through the complexities of learning a second language, a symbol of what they aspire to be, the end result of the internal conflict they face.

That end result, it seems, does not provide much comfort. Marjan is a woman constantly conflicted, essentially spliced into two separate identities: her Farsi-speaking self and her English-speaking self. Now, in Iran, she escapes into the latter identity by teaching this course, and requires an “English Only” bubble from her students. Nour portrays this identity struggle in a subtle but compelling way ⁠— we can see in her movements how one identity bleeds into the other, how her eyes shift when her identity does.

The theme of conflicting identities is ever-present in English, and the directing and design choices emphasize this while also letting the text speak for itself. Adams’ staging retains a natural and intimate quality throughout, while Afsoon Pajoufar’s naturalistic scenic design features a line of windows that might offer a glimpse into the outside world if there weren’t a concrete wall standing in between, reinforcing the sense of the classroom as a bubble that exists distinct from the Iran outside.

Meanwhile, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes enhance the complexities and contradictions faced by the characters as they enter an English-speaking world that in many ways was forced upon them. At one point, Elham, whose multifaceted nature Grammy portrays sharply, underlines her frustration with having to learn English simply because it is the lingua franca of the Western world. As she does so, she dons an Adidas jacket, a symbol of how Western culture has already invaded so much of her life. Speaking Farsi exclusively is perhaps the one aspect that it has not.

Ameri’s passionate Roya and Ebrahimzadeh’s thoughtful Omid face similar struggles. As they both contemplate leaving Iran, they are faced with what they will lose in doing so. “Our voluntary migration from this is something we should be grieving,” Roya says of her transition to English.

Only Goli, another student played by an under-utilized Narges Kalogli, is optimistic about her English-speaking self. As fascinating as that aspect of her character is, though, it is underexplored as she serves a mainly functional role for the other characters. Still, her naivety about losing any aspect of herself in English is a grim reminder of how far Western ideals have seeped.

And yet, it is not lost on anyone, the audience included, that English is a play intended for a Western, specifically American, viewership. A constant reminder of that is served in the form of the play’s handling of language ⁠— when the characters speak English, we hear accented English; when they speak Farsi, we hear unaccented English, so what feels natural to the characters sounds natural to us.

It is a clever trick that obviously serves a functional purpose in overcoming the language barrier, but it is just as important to the effectiveness of the show. After all, we can see how the actors shift when they switch from English to “Farsi.” We can observe the internal conflict as they struggle with what comes naturally to us. We can feel the guilt as Elham explains the hard truth that so many native English speakers won’t view someone as human if they speak Farsi, if they have an accent, if they don’t speak perfect, fluent, mother-tongue English.

Indeed, it speaks volumes that a story like English won’t be heard here unless it is performed entirely in its titular language. So many people have lost a piece of themselves in order to communicate stories like this one to the English-speaking world. In that ability to do so, they may have gained something, too, as Marjan argues, but a price is paid nonetheless.

Few understand how high that price is. Studio Theatre’s English simply asks that you do.