'Once Upon a Time' is now for Wiesel play
Guila Clara Kessous had already been working for a few years on her doctoral dissertation when one of her professors at Boston University, knowing that she was writing about the plays of Paul Claudel and Elie Wiesel, came to her with a little-known Wiesel drama that had never been translated from the original French.
"I know you'll be interested in this," he told her.
Of course, she was - and not just because the professor who gave it to her was Elie Wiesel himself.
Wiesel wrote the brief drama, set in 1942 in an Eastern European Jewish ghetto, in 1968, and it was included in a French collection of his work. But the English translation's editor decided to omit it because as a play it "didn't fit," Kessous exclaims incredulously, with the essays that make up the rest of the book.
At last, however, "Once Upon a Time" will appear on an American stage - for one night only, tomorrow, at BU's Tsai Performance Center. After approving her translation of the play, Wiesel has also given Kessous permission to stage one performance in New York City. After that, who knows? But already Kessous feels satisfied that this production serves as a fitting culmination to her five years of working toward a doctorate in comparative drama at BU - and it's also a way to combine theory and practice, which she finds central to her approach to theater.
"I always do theory in practice, just as I do Shabbas every week, because it keeps me healthy," says Kessous, a French actress and director who has staged plays both here and in Paris and Avignon. "For me it was impossible not to perform, not to direct, and so I really try with one production each year to address a question that has to do with my thesis: How can we put transcendence onstage?"
Pairing Wiesel and Claudel to explore this question might initially feel surprising. What does a world-renowned Holocaust survivor and human-rights advocate have in common with a relatively obscure French diplomat whose lengthy free-verse dramas are little known in this country and often criticized for political rigidity and even anti-Semitism at home?
But Kessous, while acknowledging that Claudel was "very much a man of his time" in his religious prejudices, also says he grew beyond them, particularly in the aftermath of World War II. And what the "profoundly Catholic" Claudel and the "profoundly Jewish" Wiesel share, she says, is a "profoundly religious" approach to drama.
"There are some things that are linked when an author is talking about religion onstage," Kessous says. "There are so many common parts - the idea of transcendence, the question of evil. And both of them slowly come to the idea that evil is necessary: We couldn't know what is good if we didn't have evil."
Wiesel has explored such ideas throughout his writing, but "Once Upon a Time" is the only play that confronts evil directly in the setting where his best-known works, such as "Night," take place: in a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany. Wiesel was out of town and not available to comment last week. But he "will say it's not about the Holocaust," Kessous says. "He will say that we have to see the play to understand what it's about."
It's about a lot of things, of course. But the story is relatively straightforward: In an unnamed ghetto, a Nazi commander randomly selects three Jewish men from a crowd, then tells the youngest and most naïve of them, Daniel, that he must choose which of the other two will die. If he refuses to choose, both will die and the whole community will suffer.
"When suddenly you give a person this God power - to choose who will live and who will die, that's an impossible task," Kessous says. In a sense, then, the play is about what we do when forced to confront an impossible choice, how - and whether - we find answers to questions we should never have been asked.
Kessous finds her answer in refusing to find an answer. "You cannot stop having questions, and you cannot find any answers," she says. She smiles as she quotes one of her favorite remarks of Wiesel's: "I believe in God, even if I disagree with Him."
Like the play itself, this discussion can start to feel pretty heady, more abstract than we often expect theater to be. But that's just what Kessous wants.
Theater that relies on eliciting a purely emotional response "treats the audience as a child," she argues. "It's time to talk to the brains of people. I don't say it won't touch the heart. But it will touch the heart through the brain."
In rehearsal, it's possible to feel the first stirrings of this approach. The production will feature video projections, music by members of the Cantata Singers, dance choreographed by Gabrielle Orcha, and a narration recorded in New York by Theodore Bikel. Little of that is visible as the actors run through their scenes in a basement rehearsal room at BU's Fitness Recreation Center, but from another space behind a curtain come the sounds the dancers are performing over: a rumbling train, a crying baby, a siren, the Kaddish prayer.
Orcha leads three other dancers in rhythmic, flowing movements that evoke a host of associations: a mother singing her child to sleep, a soldier marching, a frightened man hiding, a woman raising her hand in fury at her fate. Again and again they raise a hand as if to start speaking, as a recorded voice says, "Once upon a time," then halts, then tries again.
"He is trying multiple times to recall his idea," Kessous explains. "Once upon a time, once upon a time - the story itself has such power that it will interrupt his words. And it's 'once upon a time,' like a fairy tale, to show the idea that it couldn't have happened, it's beyond imagination."
But it did happen, of course, and that's the essence of what she wants to transmit. At one point during the videotaping of his performance as the Witness who's telling us this tale, Kessous says, Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter quietly pushed up his sleeve to show the number tattooed on his arm.
"It was very moving," she says. "He did it, how can I say, without shame. Without anger. It was just a very natural way to explain: I'm just trying to say this is what happened."
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 