Off-Broadway Double Header of Plays Directed by Igor Golyak at the Classic Stage Co.
The two plays are “Our Class” which takes the stage on Sept. 12 through November 3–following a successful sell out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last winter–and the Shakespearian classic “The Merchant of Venice,” which will start running on November 22 for a month. Both productions are directed by Igor Golyak.
| 06 Sep 2024 | 01:17
Director Igor Golyak will have two plays running back-to-back at the Off Broadway theater Classic Stage Company. “Our Class” debuts Sept. 12 to November 3 and it will be followed by his own take on Shakespeare’s classic “The Merchant of Venice” starting on November 22. (
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Stephen Ochner stars as Jakub Katz in the play “Our Class” which after a successful sold-out run at BAM is now playing at the Classic Stage Co. theater through November 2. (
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The playbill for “Our Class” which is the of two plays from director Igor Goylak (
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Tess Goldwyn stars as Zocha and Andrey Burkovskiy stars as Menachem in the play “Our Class.” (
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“Our Class” was such a success at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this year that it’s moving Off-Broadway to Classic Stage Company for a return engagement beginning September 12. This one follows ten Polish classmates, five Jewish and five Catholic, growing up as playmates, friends, and neighbors, who then turn on one another with life and death consequences. Inspired by real life events surrounding a horrific 1941 pogrom in a small village, the play follows their lives from childhood through eight decades of upheaval.
The play is history, but somehow feels eerily topical. How many of us will recall out own ancestries? My Jewish father and his mother escaped a pogrom in Ukraine, and at the age of eight, he finally landed here. He went on to achieve the American dream.
The show will be doubled with Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” That one has been done countless times countless ways. The last I saw, featured the great black actor John Douglas Thompson playing Shylock. It worked.
Both productions are directed by the esteemed theatrical force Igor Golyak, who is Ukrainian and Jewish. Arriving in the U.S. as a refugee at age 11, he eventually founded and runs Arlekin Players, a theater of immigrants, outside of Boston. His last outing in New York was “The Orchard” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht. He is widely recognized as one of the leaders in the new virtual and hybrid theater genre, and for his use of emerging technology in his artistry which wrestles with themes of the human consequences of war, displacement, immigration, antisemitism, finding home, identity, empathy and shared human experience.” If that’s not enough, well, what is?
I asked Golyak if the word “classic” intimidates him in any way. Or perhaps challenges him. “I don’t know who decides what a “classic” is,” he says, “but on CSC’s website they talk about their work as “exploring and re-imagining great stories that illuminate our common humanity,” and for sure, that’s what we are doing with this contemporary production of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s masterpiece and Shakespeare’s “Merchant.” I think the CSC audience is our audience. It has held the work of so many established and new artists over its history, and I’m humbled to join them and have the opportunity of our residency there with these two powerful, back-to-back, great stories re-imagined.”
I asked him how much freedom one has with a Shakespearean play, in particular, that has obviously been done so many times and so many ways.
“A lot, but with great caution,” he says. “I’m not interested in staging a muse piece. I’m interested in what is in the DNA of the play that speaks to us now, in a new context, something that is relevant to our contemporary human lives now. Composer Gustav Mahler (who, by the way, was Jewish and had to convert) said, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the transmission of fire.” That’s how I think about any play I direct.”
Michele Willens’ weekly podcast, “Stage Right..Or Not” airs on Robinhoodradio.