In Ukraine, the air raid alert is not a siren. It is an app. You download it when you arrive, it sits in your phone between the photos and the boarding passes, and at three in the morning it wakes you with a sound you have never heard before and will never forget.

This was the end of July, in Yavoriv, a small town in western Ukraine. I was there with the Campfire Project, which brings artists to work with families displaced by the war. Jessica Hecht, who leads it, invited me because she knew I am from Ukraine and knew what it would mean to me to go back. She asked my sister to help write the grant for the project, and then she asked me to join the team. A photographer, a dance teacher, a psychiatrist, a logistics lead, three theater instructors and me, the director. Eighty children between five and fifteen, and one week to build a show with them.

The nearest bomb shelter was a ten minute drive from our hotel. Mariana, a local woman working with us, had a car, so she drove us there in groups of four, back and forth across a dark town, making jokes the whole way. Nobody gives medals for this. I am writing her name down instead. Mariana.

Our group arrived fifteen or twenty minutes after the alert. The shelter was a basement under the hospital, one long corridor with some chairs along the side, and it was empty. The town was asleep upstairs. After years of this, people make their own calculations about which nights are worth going underground. We were the only ones who came down.

There was a nine year old child with us, an American, in Ukraine with his parents, who were teaching with us. He knew there was a war. He knew this was a bomb shelter. He did not know what to do with his face. He was scared, his parents were exhausted, and for some reason I was not, so I did the only thing I know how to do with a frightened audience. I looked at the corridor and saw a runway.

We made a fashion show. Someone put on music, and the music was RuPaul, “Supermodel,” a song whose entire refrain is an instruction to keep going. You better work. A white duvet became a floor length couture cape, worn with the deadest model stare I have ever seen. A beige teddy bear went over one shoulder like a designer bag. Wide pajama pants walked that corridor as if it were Milan. Jessica walked. The whole team walked, one by one, whatever rags and bedding the shelter offered turned into a look.

The child watched all of it. Then he took a yellow and green paisley shawl, wrapped it over his sweater, a sweater with stars on it, and stepped out. At the end of the runway he grabbed both ends of the shawl and spread his arms wide, the whole pattern open like wings, held it, smiled, turned on his heel, and marched back while the whole basement cheered.

Then the app announced the all clear. We kept playing. It was fun.

At some point a nurse came down, the woman on the overnight shift in the hospital above us. She asked if we wanted to see a baby that had just been born. Some of the group went upstairs. I did not go. I never saw the baby.

I did not need to. It was enough to sit in that basement and know that directly above us, lying by a window during an air raid, in the last place on earth you would put something precious, there was a brand new human being. Completely happy. Completely unaware. Completely free. Somebody came down into a shelter and told us a story about a life over our heads, and the story alone did the work.

We walked back to the hotel through a beautiful dawn and slept. And toward the end of that day, something surfaced. You know the gesture people make to show an idea exploding inside their head? That was the actual feeling.

In June, less than two months before that night, I staged a scene in my production of Delirium in which two people hide in a bomb shelter. One of them says: tell me a story. And the other builds an escape out loud, a flight to the moon, then to the sun, away from this world. An imagined sky, invented so that two people can survive the real one.

I staged people surviving a bomb shelter by playing. Eight weeks later I was in a bomb shelter, and I did not think of the play once. I reached for rags and music and made a game, because a frightened child was watching and something in me already knew what that room was for.

I texted Chulpan Khamatova, who plays the woman who asks for the story in my play. “Does this remind you of anything?” I could not believe it. I still do not entirely believe it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a man who came up to me after a performance of this play and asked, how did you know. He had lived that scene in a shelter in Israel, grown people building a story around one small girl. I answered that I did not know, that Ionesco knew, and that I had only dug the living thing out of the text. I thought I was writing about him. In July I found out the question was addressed to me.

People imagine that intuition is a guess. It is not a guess. It is knowledge that arrives before the experience that would prove it. And it does not come from nowhere. It comes from doing two opposite things at once: breaking free of the playwright, refusing to execute him, and at the same time going so deep into him, his war, his daughter, his fears, that your subconscious fills with things nobody ever consciously taught you. Then one night at three in the morning, when you need it, all of it is served back to you.

In rehearsal, that voice is quiet and easy to argue with. Listen to it the way you would listen to it in a bomb shelter. It knows before you do.

The show was on July 30th. Dances the children built with the dance teacher, little scenes they wrote themselves and performed, photographs they took, collages they made from the photographs. Before it started I stood in the doorway where the audience enters, right next to the stage, and checked the picture the way I have checked a thousand stage pictures. Children ready. Music ready. Audience seated. And the picture was wrong.

I stood in that doorway looking at a full room and could not name the problem. It was simple, and it refused to make sense. Then it arrived. There were only women. Rows of mothers and grandmothers, and not one man in the audience except the priest. The men are at war.

That is what this war looks like from a doorway. Not numbers on the news. A full house with half of it missing.

We went to Yavoriv so that eighty children would know they are not forgotten, that people far away know what they are living through and came to play with them. I saw what it meant to them. But I must be honest about the arithmetic of that week: I could never give those families as much as they gave me. I have never felt the meaning of my profession more clearly than in that basement and in that doorway. Jessica and Campfire handed me that, and I cannot repay it, so I am doing the only thing I know. I am telling you the story.

The show ended with a surprise I had not told the children about. I called them to me, quickly, into a tight circle at the center (this part they knew), and put into their hands paper airplanes folded from the portrait collages they had made all week. Since the invasion, no passenger plane has crossed that sky. What flies over Ukraine now is drones and missiles, and the pilots who go up at night to meet them and do not always come back. Children in Yavoriv do not look up when something flies. They go underground when the app tells them to.

And then, out of a circle of laughing children, thirty paper airplanes rose at once and flew across the room toward their mothers. For a few seconds, that room had a sky, and the sky was full of free flight.

I do not know what the mothers’ faces did. My back was to them, on purpose. I was trying to disappear, so that the final picture would have no director in it. Only children, laughing, throwing airplanes. And behind me I could hear the mothers. Happy. For a moment.

“Tell me a story.” That is how we survive.

A few years ago, in the foyer of our studio, one of my actors made a joke that I have not been able to put down.

We were celebrating something. I do not remember what. Misha was there, one of the founding members of the company, fifteen years with us, one of the people who are the reason the company exists at all. On the news that week was Colleyville. A man had walked into a synagogue in Texas during Shabbat and taken the rabbi and three others hostage. We stood around in our coats, half celebrating, half talking about Texas. The terrible thing was far away. The wine was close.

And Misha, in the middle of it, said: so where do we go next?

Everyone laughed. It was a joke. Then everyone put on their coats and went home. The joke stayed.

It is an old joke. It is the oldest joke. Where do we go next is the question a Jew keeps within reach, the way other people keep a spare key. My grandfather’s name was Fleishman. In the Soviet Union it became Golyak, so that it would not sound like what it was. I already went next once, from Kyiv to Boston. Misha was not asking a question. He was naming a reflex. The exit you locate in every room before you take off your coat.

Last week that reflex got its reasons.

On the tenth of July, Poland marked eighty-five years since Jedwabne. It is the event my production Our Class was built around. In the summer of 1941, in a small town where Catholics and Jews had been neighbors for centuries, gone to the same school, played on the same teams, the Catholic half of the town drove the Jewish half into a barn and burned them alive. For sixty years it was blamed on the Germans. Then a book proved it was the neighbors. The town has been arguing about that sentence ever since.

This year the argument put on a ceremony of its own.

A few meters from the official commemoration, where the Chief Rabbi of Poland prayed and the names of the dead were read, a politician named Grzegorz Braun and his party raised a wooden cross and unveiled a plaque. Braun is the man who once took a fire extinguisher to the Hanukkah candles in the Polish parliament. His plaque at Jedwabne calls for prayer for the victims of, and I am quoting it, German Nazism and Russian-Jewish Sovietism. His people demanded that the dead be dug up again, to prove the neighbors did not do it.

Read the phrase again. Russian-Jewish Sovietism. At the site where Jews were burned by their neighbors, a plaque now names the Jews among the guilty. This is not forgetting. Forgetting is passive, forgetting is a town that lets the grass grow over a thing. This is authorship. Someone took the sentence that says the neighbors did it and wrote a new sentence on top of it. In the new sentence, my people are no longer inside the barn. They are in the crowd that lit it.

I did not stand in Jedwabne last week. A letter reached me from a man who did.

His name is Kamil Mrozowicz. He grew up in Jedwabne, a son of the town that did the killing. He is Polish, not Jewish. For years he has cared for the Jewish cemetery there, taught the town its own Jewish history, and refused to let the murder be smoothed into something softer. His own local officials have tried to shut the work down. Last week he stood at the commemoration while, a short walk away, the cross went up, the plaque was unveiled, and men came to impose the lie on the day. He stood there anyway. He has said, to the people who show up beside him each year: I know it is hard, but seeing you and talking to you, I know that I am not alone.

Where do we go next. Everyone answers it with their body.

Braun builds a monument to the lie, so the question never has to be asked.

Misha keeps the exit in view, so that when the question is answered badly he is already gone.

And Kamil, who has more reason than any of us to look away, because it is his town, his neighbors, his own people on the wrong side of the fire, does the thing none of the reflexes predict. He stays. He plants himself in the ground beside the graves and guards the sentence.

I am somewhere between them. A Jew who already went next once. Who changed his name back, in a way, by putting the burning on a stage on purpose, in America, in rooms full of people who, since Colleyville, since a hundred things, no longer feel entirely safe in their own seats.

People ask what a play can do against a plaque. A plaque is concrete. It is bolted to the ground. A play is gone the moment the lights come up.

But a plaque can only give you an answer. That is the whole of what it is for. It closes the question. Our Class was built to do the thing the plaque cannot: to keep the question open, to hold a thousand people in the dark with something they cannot settle and cannot leave behind them at the door. The plaque tells you where the dead belong. The play refuses, and sends you home still carrying them.

I cannot answer Misha. I did not make the show to answer him. I made it so the question would have somewhere to live that is not a suitcase and not a lie.

What I can tell him is what the letter told me. In a field in Poland, with the wrong monument going up a few meters behind him, Kamil stood at the graves.

He was not alone.

I have turned on paid subscriptions for Theater of Questions. That is the small news. The news that matters more is what does not change: every essay stays free, in full, for everyone. Nothing goes behind a paywall.

You know what this page is by now. I write from inside the rehearsal room: the essays on directing and exile and memory, the production journals, the occasional live conversation, the questions I am living with before they become anything polished. Theater, for me, is a sacred laboratory. These essays are how I invite you in.

This is happening because of thirteen readers. Before payments were even on, before there was a button to press, thirteen of you pledged support. Nobody asked you to.

I have watched audiences refuse to leave the theater after a curtain call. This felt like that. Not applause. A decision. Thank you.

I want to name what the writing costs, without complaint. It costs time. An essay takes the same discipline a rehearsal takes: showing up when nothing works, cutting the paragraph I love most, starting again until the sentence is true. I write between productions, before rehearsals, after everyone has gone home.

It is not a side project. It is the same practice in a different room.

You watched this page go quiet this spring. That was Delirium: the production took every hour I had. The essays resume now, a new one every Tuesday.

A paid subscription here is not what the word usually means. You are not buying access, because there is no access to buy; everything I write is already open. It is patronage, an old arrangement and an honest one: it buys the time the writing takes, and it keeps the essays free for the student who cannot pay and for the theater-maker between productions.

You are not opening a door for yourself. You are holding it open for someone else.

If you want to do that, it is $8 a month, $80 a year, or $150 a year as a founding member. No tier unlocks anything, because nothing is locked. What the money buys is simple: the writing continues, and it stays free for everyone.

And if paying is not possible for you right now, stay exactly where you are. Read. Reply to any of these emails; your reply comes straight to me, and I read every one myself.

The door stays open.

The production was correct. The lights hit their marks, the doors opened on cue, the actors stood where the page told them to stand and said every line in the order the lines were written. When it ended the audience applauded, the even applause of people who got exactly what they expected, and reached for their coats. Nobody in that room walked out different than they walked in.

I have sat in that dark and learned to read that applause. A thing that is arranged correctly and a thing that is alive are not the same thing, and the body knows the difference before the mind can argue with it. What I am watching is a corpse. Not a play. A corpse. A body that was alive once, inside the emergency of another person, inside the year of another person, carried into the rehearsal room and propped up in a chair and dressed in the right clothes and asked to speak.

And it does speak. It does everything you ask. It just will not breathe.

I want to be fair to the director who built it, because I have been that director, and the instinct is honorable. You were trained to open the text, find the stage directions, honor the playwright, execute what is on the page as faithfully as you can. The page is what you were handed. The page is what the critics check you against. You want to serve the writer, to be the honest vessel through which a great mind reaches the audience. Nobody wants to be the vain director who smears his own fingerprints across a masterpiece.

So you make yourself small. You follow the directions, you honor the pauses, you handle the script like a relic under museum glass. You call this respect.

It is not respect. It is a burial with good manners.

Consider the play I have been living inside for months. Ionesco wrote Delire a deux, frenzy for two, on a commission that specified almost nothing. A bed in the middle, two doors on the sides, a couple that fights. That is the whole brief. A man and a woman argue about whether a snail and a turtle are the same animal. They insult each other, they contradict each other, one of them says the telephone is a cheese, and the cheese is a music box, and the music box is a door.

On the page it is nonsense. The director who stages the nonsense faithfully produces exactly that. A tasteful evening of nonsense, correctly lit. It will please the three people in the audience who have studied Ionesco, because they are not watching a play, they are recognizing a text, and recognition is its own small love. Everyone else is watching something that never comes alive in front of them and never touches the world they have to walk back out into. Nobody can tell you why they should care.

Because the words in Ionesco are not information. They are a shell. When one of them says the telephone is a cheese, the sentence is supposed to mean nothing, because these are two people using language to hide inside. Anything can be proven to be anything, and if anything is everything, then everything is nothing. Chekhov taught the theater to write this way, and Ionesco and Beckett and Pinter learned it from him. The words are not there to tell you what is happening. They are there to cover it. Stage the words and you stage the cover. You keep the shell and throw away the animal that lived in it.

Ionesco knew what his words were. A word, he wrote in his diary, is only a skin over a reality it has imprisoned and hidden, and his hope for his own writing was to give the lie to each spoken word, to take it apart, to make it explode. The author of the script you are treating as sacred is instructing you to break it open. Staging his surface faithfully is not obedience. It is the one instruction of his you refused.

So the question is never what are they saying. The question is why. Why are these two people fighting while the world ends. The theoretical answer, the one that touches nothing, is that people fight because people fight.

They are not fighting. They are reaching.

When every other thread to the world has been cut, this argument is the last live wire between them. Her proof that the snail and the turtle are the same creature is that both carry their houses on their backs. The best he can answer is that a slug is a snail without a house. This argument is not a disagreement. It is a game they have played their whole relationship, the private nonsense every couple keeps, and they keep playing it because as long as one of them is still stupid enough to argue back, the other one knows they are still there. Still in the room. Still alive. That is the play. Not the words. The thing the words are protecting.

Ionesco even proves it in a stage direction. In the middle of the argument a bullet comes through the window, and the first words out of both of them, in the same instant, are: are you hurt. Then the insults resume. The argument was never the truth of them. The bullet found the truth in half a second.

I found the fish at a residency in Italy, while I was still conceiving the piece. I had been trading images with my set designer, a German who barely speaks English and mostly does not listen when I explain what a play is about. Or maybe he does? We do not work by discussing meaning. We push images at each other until one of them cracks open. What cracked open was this: the play needed something alive in its dead world, something that would keep existing while the people destroy themselves. One morning I came down to breakfast and announced it to the whole table. There is going to be a fish.

Not a metaphor of a fish. A real fish, alive, in a real tank, on the stage, for the entire play, while the apartment around it is stripped to nothing. The fish was never in the text. It could not be in the text. And it was suddenly the truest thing on the stage.

We named her Jeannette, after a nonsense fairy tale about going to the moon that Ionesco wrote for his daughter, a story I had folded into the adaptation so the couple could leave the aquarium for one moment and fly into their own shared imagination. After we named her we threw her a welcoming party. We got in touch with her agent. The actors started to complain that the fish was stealing their scenes. She has an aquarium and she has an equity contract and she does not know that any of us are here.

The tank stays through the whole piece. By the end she is the only thing on the stage we have not destroyed. When the couple cannot decide something, where Jeannette swims decides it for them. Drift left, the wife wins. Drift right, the husband wins. She has no idea she is deciding anything. She is a live and beautiful thing continuing to be alive in the middle of two people tearing each other apart, the way the fields around Auschwitz keep their calm light. I stood in those fields once, making another play. What stopped my breath was not the horror. It was the trees, still growing, indifferent and alive.

Nature does not know what we have done. The fish does not know she is casting the deciding vote. And neither do we.

None of that is on the page. All of it is the play.

Chulpan Khamatova and Andrei Burkovsky are masters. They were among the best actors in Russia, and they left at the start of the war, and they have carried their homes on their backs ever since, which is exactly what a snail and a turtle do, which is why this play is theirs and belongs to no one else. So I did not hand them the shape. I handed them obstacles. To cross from one side of the room to the other they could never walk in a straight line. There must always be a puddle in the center, something in the way.

Out of the obstacles the invention came pouring. A dog leash becomes the pull-cord of a generator, because in Ukraine right now a generator is not a metaphor, it is the difference between light and dark. Two people invent survival in front of you, in real time, and you watch them make it out of nothing. That visible act is the reimagination. It is not decoration on top of Ionesco. It is the only way Ionesco can breathe now.

Ionesco put those characters in a bathrobe, a thing that meant something in 1962 and means nothing today. So I do not put an actor in a bathrobe and call it fidelity. I ask what a bathrobe was, a thing you wear when you are not going anywhere, or are preparing to go somewhere, and I dress the couple in the best clothes they put on seventeen years ago to go out on the night the war started, clothes they have never taken off since.

That is more faithful to Ionesco than the bathrobe. It is faithful to the animal, not the shell it crawled out of.

People hear reimagination and assume rewriting. It is the opposite. Nearly every word spoken on my stage is Ionesco’s, including the tales I folded in from his journals. I rebuild the forms and keep the words.

And here is the part the “faithful” director never gets to feel. When you stop serving the text and start building the living thing, the play begins to tell you things the writer never wrote. Someone in the audience said it to me. The fish in her tank, the couple in their sealed room, us in the theater. Three sealed worlds, nothing crossing. I had not thought of it. It was not in my plan and it was not in the script. It was simply there, because we had built something alive enough to have thoughts of its own. A corpse does not surprise you.

Another night a man ran up to me and asked “how did you know.” He had been in a bomb shelter in Israel, and there was a small girl, and to keep her from the fear the grown people began building her a story, each adding a piece. He showed me the photo. A choo-choo train of frightened adults turned into children around one child. That is the scene the couple fall into when they leave the aquarium. I did not know. Ionesco knew. He wrote it for his daughter after his own war, long before ours, and I only dug the living thing out and built it a form.

This is the whole job. Go deeper into the text than the “faithful” director ever goes, deep enough to find what the writer hid there, the way life hides what matters most, then build the form that can hold it now. The test is simple. If what you found makes the writer larger, it was his. If it makes him smaller, it was yours. Ask of every stage direction not how do I do this, but what was he trying to survive when he wrote it. Answer that in your own century, with your own dead, and throw the instruction manual away.

The author gave you the shell. Your job is the animal.

There is a moment that happens before almost every Holocaust play begins, and it happens before the lights even go down.

The audience buttons up.

Not as a choice they make. More like something the body does on its own. They read the program, they settle into their seats, and somewhere inside a small arrangement occurs. The sorting comes first: they decide, without knowing they are deciding, which people they are about to watch belong in the column of victims and which belong in the column of perpetrators. And once the sorting is done, the armor follows. They know their job. They know where to direct their grief and where to direct their horror. They sit there, protected, waiting.

And once the audience has buttoned up, the play cannot reach them.

As theater makers, this is not something audiences do to us. This is something we produce in them. Through our staging choices, through the story we decide to tell and how we decide to tell it. The buttoning up is not their failure. It is ours.

Almost every production of this kind of material leads the audience sort. It signals, through costume and staging and the specific quality of cruelty on display, which column is which. And there is mercy in this. It makes the unbearable bearable.

It also makes the play a lie.

Because Our Class will not let you sort. Not through a dramatic reversal. Not through a moment where the columns flip. It works more slowly than that, and in a way the audience cannot defend against.

The play follows ten Polish classmates, five Jewish and five Catholic, from the 1920s into the war years. You watch them become people. Specific, funny, flawed, recognizable people who want what you want. And then in 1941, one half of the class burns the other half alive in a barn. It was not the Nazis who did it. It was the neighbors. And then you watch some of them make one small choice under pressure, and then another, and then another. You keep waiting for the moment they cross over. The moment you can move them to the other column and be free of them. The moment never comes. Because there was no single moment. That is what will not let you go.

I understand why directors explain. You are staging something incomprehensible and you want the audience inside it. So you build a case. Here is the childhood. Here is the wound. Here is the moment the ideology took hold. And sometimes that case is even true. Sometimes what happened to a person does lead somewhere terrible. The problem is not that the explanation is wrong. The problem is that it is always incomplete. And the audience, receiving it, uses it as an exit. I do not have that wound. I did not have that childhood. I would not have done that. And they sort. And they button up. And they leave.

The why matters. The why that closes the door and provides an explanation does not. Because explaining why is not the same as understanding who. And the why, however carefully constructed, always narrows. It makes the character smaller, not larger. More explicable, not more human. Good and evil are not distributed according to biography. They coexist in everyone, always, without needing a reason. Theater’s job is to hold that coexistence open. The moment you close it with an explanation, the audience can breathe again. And that breath is the play dying.

In the summer of 2023, I traveled to Poland with the playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek and our scenographer Jan Pappelbaum, the head designer at the Schaubühne in Berlin. A German, a Pole, and a Jew, walking through Jedwabne.

Jan is a very tall, quiet man. At the site of the pogrom, he sat for a long time, photographing. Then he stopped. He looked at me and said: do you still want to do this with me?

I have not stopped thinking about that question.

We stood where the barn had been. The view was extraordinary. Peaceful hills, forest, light moving across water somewhere below. Unbelievably beautiful. And standing there I understood something that the play then confirms inside the theater: the world does not organize itself around our tragedies. The beauty was there before the barn burned. It is there now. The hills do not know what they witnessed. Horror and beauty do not sort themselves into separate columns. They coexist without apology. And that coexistence, that refusal to separate, is exactly what this play asks the audience to hold. Not as an idea. As an experience.

There is a monument at the site. For decades the original read: killed by Gestapo and Nazi soldiers. Then a book came out proving it was the neighbors. They replaced the monument. The new inscription honors the dead. It does not name who killed them. The neighbors are not mentioned. Not denied. Simply absent.

As if unknown.

The town is still sorting. Still protecting itself from the implication that it was them, ordinary neighbors, people who had shared meals and classrooms and celebrations with the people they burned. Not a lie this time. Something quieter. A careful silence where the perpetrators should be. The monument honors the dead while protecting the living. That is what sorting looks like when it gets built into stone. That is what this play will not let you have.

There is a character in the play named Jacob Katz. He is one of the Jewish students. He is the first one killed.

I have a son named Jacob. He is seven years old.

In rehearsal, when an actor says that name on stage, I cannot button up. I do not think I am the only one in the theater for whom a name lands that way.

One night at BAM, after a performance, the audience stayed in their seats for a long time. Gradually, people began to leave. One woman remained. She was in her seventies. When I approached her she had a quality I can only describe as a light gaze, almost enlightened. I asked if she was all right.

She said: no part of my family died in that barn. But I am so touched by this. And so thankful to be in the company of others.

She was not connected to this history by blood. She had no relatives to grieve. She stayed because of the room. Because for a few minutes more she was still in it with the people around her, still in the company of strangers who had just had the same thing happen to them.

I have thought about her more than about any review this production has received.

This is what you are building when you refuse the explanation. Not a lesson. A room. A room full of people who cannot sort, who cannot find the line, who are sitting in the dark with the same open question and nowhere comfortable to put it. That is the only thing theater can make that nothing else can. Not understanding. Not answers. A room where strangers discover they are not alone with what they cannot resolve.

Stop explaining why they did it. Stage who they are. The warmth and the horror. The same person. Always.

Our Class | Z Space | San Francisco | March 27 - April 5

I was twenty years old and I thought I understood what this work was for. I was a student at the Schukin Theater School in Moscow, performing at the Vakhtangov Theatre alongside actors I considered legends, breathing in something I couldn’t yet name. Then a film role came my way. Small part. Conflicting dates. I asked for a substitute on a few shows. Seemed reasonable.

I was called to the office of Vladimir Etush who was a rector at the school. Movie star. Legendary Soviet actor. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew his face.

He looked at me and said: “Я служу театру больше пятидесяти лет.”

I have served the theater for more than fifty years. Not worked. Not performed. Served. He had never missed a day. Not for film. Not for sickness. Not for anything.

I walked out confused. Why служу? Why that word? He could have said I have worked in the theater. I have spent my life in the theater. Why serve?

The meaning didn’t land for years. It’s not about sacrifice or nobility or any of that. It’s about orientation. It’s about where you point yourself when you walk into the room. It’s about asking not what you want to express, but how you can be useful. To society. To the people who showed up. That is the greatest reward from the work. From any life. From mine.

Not long ago in a class I teach in New York, a student performed Nina’s monologue from The Seagull. She cried her eyes out. Genuinely. Deeply. An emotional experience that was, for her, completely real and completely overwhelming.

I class was untouched.

I sat there watching the students around me decide how to respond to what they had just witnessed. And here is the beautiful and painful thing about American theater culture: everyone wanted to support her. I find that instinct genuinely moving, the way this community holds each other. They said: how deep she went. How much she felt.

The problem wasn’t that she was telling a story. The problem is she wasn’t in the room at all.

That’s self-therapy with an audience present. The audience hears the narration of emotion, understands on some intellectual level that this person is hurting, and remains completely, safely separate from it. Separate from their own lives. Separate from anything that could shift something inside them. The performer is having her catharsis. The audience is watching someone have a catharsis. Those are not the same experience and they never will be.

Your catharsis is not my theater.

Nothing transforms when the work is not for the room.

When we began Our Class, I told the actors: we are not staging a play about what has happened. We are staging a play about what will happen.

That single reframe changes everything. The adrenaline changes. The urgency changes. If this is going to happen to me, to my children, to my grandchildren, I don’t walk onto that stage the same way. I don’t deliver lines. I don’t express myself. I do something else entirely. I serve the people sitting in the dark asking whether this could happen to them.

Once that becomes the DNA, the inner dialogue with the audience, the production starts growing beyond you. The development moves out of the director’s hands and into the audience’s. Actors and audiences build the play together because it is needed, in this room, on this night, by these specific people.

And then the play graduates.

Our Class doesn’t belong to me anymore. It graduated from me into something that belongs to itself, the way a child eventually does.

I think about the audiences after performances. Ushers cleaning the house, playbills scattered everywhere. A third of the audience stays sitting, looking at the empty stage. Not talking. One by one, slowly, people start to leave. An elderly woman stays the longest - her relatives had died in a pogrom. But it isn’t only about her specific connection. It’s about what everyone in that room is carrying together, in that silence. The understanding that we are not alone in this. That other people in the world are thinking about the same thing. Not a word is said. Some people stand outside, smoking, they won’t leave the building. The ushers have to ask people to go.

That is not a story about a successful production. That is a story about a production that stopped being about me.

I don’t think service is a soft word. I don’t think it means subordinating your artistic instinct or making work that is safe or pleasing or easy to receive. The most demanding thing I have ever asked of an audience, they stayed for it, sat in silence for it, stood outside in the cold because of it. Service is not compromise. Service is the decision that the work must land in another human being or it hasn’t done anything at all.

Strip away the building if you have to. Stage it anywhere. But whatever the space, whatever the material, point toward the people in the room. Not toward how deeply you feel. Not toward what you want to express. Toward what they need to experience, together, in a way they couldn’t have experienced alone.

We are not telling something. We are not demonstrating something. We are touching something, and the extraordinary thing, the thing that made me fall in love with this work, is that when it happens you can feel the whole room change. People who have never met each other and will never see each other again share something they cannot name, and they carry it out into the street, and something in them is different.

That is worth serving.

That is worth fifty years.

Our Class is touring to Z Space in San Francisco, March 27 - April 5.

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I know I will be excommunicated from the world of theater for saying this, but every actor who thinks their job is to tell a story is slowly killing their work. And if you have spent years believing that it is your job, someone has stolen something from you, and I want you to have it back. That belief is not a small misunderstanding you can correct at the edges. It is the whole problem. It is the reason a perfectly good actor can stand on stage, say every word correctly, hit every moment, and leave me feeling absolutely nothing, like watching a very beautiful, very elaborate funeral for something that was never allowed to be born.

The strange thing is, it comes from the right place. The impulse to communicate, to make sure the audience understands, that is not a bad instinct. It just happens to be the wrong job. And nobody told you that. So you keep doing it, getting better and better at something that is quietly working against you the whole time.

The Diagnosis

Here is what is actually happening when an actor decides to tell me the story. They pick up the text and treat it like scripture. Every stage direction, every pause Chekhov wrote, every indication of how a character moves or speaks, they follow it to the letter because Chekhov wrote it and Chekhov is Chekhov. But even Stanislavsky fell into this trap. When he was rehearsing The Cherry Orchard, he filled it with pauses, following everything on the page exactly as written, and Chekhov stopped him. These are not external pauses, Chekhov told him. This is something internal. He wasn’t leaving instructions. He was leaving traces of an inner life. There is a difference between the letter of the text and the spirit of it, and the actor who cannot tell them apart will execute everything correctly and understand nothing.

Because the text is not the job. The text is evidence. It is clues at a crime scene. And your job is not to recite the clues back to me, it is to investigate what actually happened in that room before anyone said a single word.

Don’t trust the characters either, by the way. Characters lie. They deceive themselves. When Constantine tells his mother his wound is healing, he is not reporting a fact. He is trying to protect her, make her feel better, from the weight of what actually happened. The words and the situation underneath the words are almost never the same thing. That gap, that is where the whole play lives. And the actor who is busy telling me the story never finds it, because they are too busy on the surface, making sure the surface is clear and readable and correct. So boring!

And then there is speed. What I see, especially in the opening third of a play, is actors sprinting. Getting rid of lines quickly, barely hearing each other, because somewhere they decided that this part is just setup, that the real play starts later. So they apologize for the beginning. They apologize for the relationships, for the atmosphere, for everything that hasn’t become dramatic yet. Speed is a form of apology. It is an actor saying: I’m sorry to be taking up your time, I’ll get through this as fast as I can. And in that apology, everything that the play is actually built on quietly collapses.

The Shift

The shift is this: you are not here to tell me a story. You are here to create a human being.

That is the whole job. And a human being is not executing anything. A human being is trying to get what they want in a specific situation with specific obstacles in front of them, and failing, and trying again, and lying to themselves about why they want it, and saying the wrong thing to the wrong person because they cannot help it, because the right person is too frightening.

When you stop trying to tell me the story and start actually living in the situation, something else begins to happen. The subconscious starts giving you things you did not plan. Your body does something your brain did not decide to do. Your partner moves and you mirror them without meaning to, because something real is passing between you. And we, in the audience, are no longer watching a performance. We are watching a person. And we recognize them. And that recognition is what breaks your heart open in the good way.

We have never seen you as this character. That is the whole point. Not a generic version, not the version someone else would play, but yours, with your weirdness and your subconscious and your specific pain walking through that specific door. By executing a role you are killing it. The role does not exist yet. It has never existed. You are the one who creates it, and if you are busy delivering it to me instead of creating it, nobody creates it. It just gets delivered. Empty.

Take Chekhov off the pedestal. He is not going on stage. You are.

The Only Question Worth Asking

When Stanislavsky staged The Seagull, he put the actors with their backs to the audience. At that time, this was simply not done. It was against every convention of how theater worked, and it hit the audience like a shock because of that. It cracked something open. But if you did the exact same thing today, nobody would flinch. Not because it isn’t interesting, but because turning actors’ backs to the audience is no longer a violation of anything. The convention that made it revolutionary no longer exists. The gesture is the same. The world around it has changed. And so it means nothing.

That is the trap of staging Chekhov today as it was staged before. You are repeating the answer to a question nobody is asking anymore. What we have to find is not Stanislavsky’s solution. What we have to find is Stanislavsky’s hunger. That refusal to accept the theatrical language of his time as the only possible language. That obsessive search for a form that could hold something true about human beings that no existing form could hold yet. What does that search look like now, in this world, with these audiences, in this moment? That is the only question worth asking. And you cannot answer it by looking backward.

A tradition is not the passing of ashes. It is the passing of a flame. And a flame cannot be copied. It can only be lit.

Stop telling me the story. Create the human being.

I buttoned up emotionally for our research trip to Poland. We went to meet playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek and to explore the real locations where the events of “Our Class” took place. Jedwabne, Auschwitz, and other sites where history’s darkness lives. I was preparing our production and knew I needed to see these places, to feel them. I braced myself for the wave of grief, for something overwhelming to hit me.

...and nothing.

It ultimately did hit, but not how I expected.

A Jew, a Pole, and a German walking into Poland. Sounds like a bad joke, right? But there we were: me, playwright Tadeusz, and Jan Pappelbaum from Berlin’s Schaubühne and our scenographer, searching for the ghosts of history.

In Lublin, Tadeusz stopped us on a hill. “This was the capital of Jewish life before the war,” he said. “90% Jewish. A Jewish university here.” He pointed down: “There it is.”

I looked. A parking lot. Nothing else.

Not a plaque, not a memorial. Just absence. And this absence crushed me more than any monument could have.

This is where they lived. Ten classmates, half Polish Catholic, half Jewish, in a small town called Jedwabne. They played soccer together. They studied together. Some fell in love. All the ordinary activities of childhood. And then one day, half of them burned the other half alive.

Antisemitism is a light sleeper. It dozes beneath the surface until difficult events happen, then it wakes, stretches, and rises. One day people play soccer together; the next day, one half burns the other half. These aren’t mystical Nazis from far away. They’re neighbors, classmates, friends.

We sometimes forget that evil can live beside us. That evil is not something that exists over the ocean, far away in a land with crazy people. It exists next to us. It can exist in the mundane, and it can erupt any moment. This kind of hate does not have geography, does not follow geographical rules, and can swim over the ocean very easily.

In America, we’re accustomed to stories about evil Nazis committing atrocities. We compartmentalize: bad people do bad things. But this play reveals something different. These perpetrators are ordinary people just like us. That’s what makes it so vital. The play challenges us to question our certainties about good and evil, pushing us toward empathy rather than judgment.

Reading journals from pogrom survivors, I found something mind-boggling: many wouldn’t leave their towns even after attacks. When asked why, one woman simply said: “We thought it couldn’t get worse.”

I don’t believe in teaching lessons of the past. If they worked, we wouldn’t be in today’s world. This play isn’t about what happened. It’s about what will happen with people like us. That’s why our actors appear in contemporary clothes, why they move fluidly between portraying children and adults.

In “Our Class,” we constantly erase and rewrite our chalk wall, just like history itself. The Russians come in, then the Germans, then the Russians again. Three symbols drawn and erased at the top of our blackboard. Chalk is erased, just like the truths in their lives, in our lives, are sometimes erased. The truth of being extra safe in America is slowly being erased right now.

Tragedy lives in the mundane. It can happen at Starbucks. It’s not separated from us by an ocean. It’s us, it’s people, it’s me.

We’re bringing “Our Class” to San Francisco this spring. This isn’t just another play we’re staging. It’s something that has been living inside me for six, seven years now, waiting for this moment. And now, with everything happening around us, its urgency has only intensified.

Most of us aren’t masochists. We don’t seek out terrible experiences. But awful things happen in life, and we often respond with humor or lightness as a way to survive. The saddest events are sometimes told through jokes because vulnerability is so difficult. There’s profound humanity in this response. All the characters in “Our Class” want happiness, and they pursue it even amid darkness.

In the first twenty minutes, we sing Tumbalalaika with the audience. Everyone gets involved. Everyone is happy together. We ruin the idea that this is a holocaust play. It’s just people enjoying each other. And then it becomes something else. That is life. That’s something that can happen. With journalism, it’s a review of events or facts. With this, it’s a way towards the heart.

In rehearsal, we’ve created what I call a “Zero Gravity Laboratory.” A space where conventional boundaries dissolve. We employ chalk drawings, movement, and music by Oscar-winner Anna Drubich to create a world where beauty and horror coexist. We find moments of unexpected laughter because that’s what humans do. We search for light even in the darkest places.

Our extraordinary ensemble brings together actors from Ukraine, Russia, Boston, and New York. Something that transcends borders. Chulpan Khamatova will be joining us. She’s an international superstar, one of Russia’s greatest actresses who left after the war began. She’ll play Rachelka/Marianna, and in her words, she wants to “speak loudly about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by hatred and war.”

Having two children, Jacob and Esther, I constantly question how they will live in this world. How do we continue to coexist?

What moved me most about the New York and Boston runs of this production, was watching audiences afterward. They didn’t rush to leave; they sat silently, needing time to process. Though the ending contains lightness and hope, something profound had shifted within them. At BAM, ushers struggled to clear the theater after each performance. When audiences finally left, they gathered outside. Some smoking, some talking, some silent. Something had happened inside that space that demanded reflection.

I don’t know exactly what each person experienced, but I recognized that the play had touched something essential. It wasn’t just a story about people who lived decades ago. It had become something immediate and personal. That’s the theater I believe in.

You know, I never thought I’d become a “Jewish director.” In theater school, there was always this sentiment about not becoming a “type” of director, and I actually agree with it. You don’t want to box yourself in. Exploring different worlds informs your outlook in the most unexpected ways.

So when someone first asked if I was a Jewish director, my Pavlov’s dog response was negative. Like, no, I’m just a director who happens to be Jewish. But given where we are now, given what’s happening in the world, given the last three plays I produced: yes, I am a Jewish director. And I’m okay with it. For now, this is where I need to be.

“Our Class“ runs March 27-April 5 at the ZSpace in San Francisco with international star Chulpan Khamatova. Tickets @ Zspace website.

“A visionary theater maker never thought he’d be ‘Jewish director’ — then the times demanded it,“ The Foward

There’s this recording I stumbled upon recently—Georgy Tovstonogov speaking to a crowd sometime in the Soviet era, his voice crackling through old tape. And suddenly he says something that makes me stop everything. He divides all theater into two categories: spectacles that give answers and spectacles that ask questions. “I am for spectacle-questions,” he declares, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

And I’m sitting there thinking—yes, THIS. This is what’s been burning in my chest all these years.

You know what happens when theater tries to give you answers? It dies. Right there on the stage. It becomes a “literal pulpit”—didactic, moralizing, telling you how to think, how to feel, what’s right and what’s wrong. Like we don’t have enough of that already. Like the world isn’t drowning in people who know exactly what you should believe.

But a question? A question is alive. It squirms. It keeps you up at night.

Tovstonogov said the highest joy for a theater maker is when someone tells you they couldn’t go straight home after the show. They had to walk the streets. Something got under their skin and they can’t even name it yet. That restlessness, that beautiful discomfort—that’s theater doing what it’s supposed to do. Not teaching. Not preaching. Just... troubling the waters of consciousness.

When we staged Our Class, I kept telling everyone—this isn’t about teaching lessons from 1941. I don’t believe in the lessons of the past. If they worked, would we be where we are today? This is about what’s going to happen. With people like us. That’s why they wear contemporary clothes, why they slip so easily from playing children to becoming monsters.

The question isn’t “how could those people do such terrible things?” The question is “when will we?”

In rehearsals, I create problems for my actors. If they need to cross from here to there, I tell them—imagine there are puddles. You can’t walk straight. You have to navigate around them, jump over them. The obstacles create the art. The questions create the oxygen.

And here’s the thing about questions that Tovstonogov understood—they have to emerge from the audience, not from the director’s ego. The director is just the one with enough skill to excavate what’s already trembling in the collective unconscious of the crowd. You’re not inventing the question. You’re uncovering it. Like those layers of old drawings we found beneath the plaster at Vilna Shul—the questions were always there, waiting under the surface.

Sometimes people ask me what message I want to send with my work. Message? What message? Western Union sends messages. I’m trying to create a space where strangers breathe together in the dark and feel something shift. Where the familiar becomes foreign and the foreign becomes suddenly, devastatingly personal.

The moment you think you have the answer, you’ve lost the theater. You’ve got a corpse, well-preserved maybe, but still dead.

So yes, I’m with Tovstonogov. Give me the productions that end with question marks hanging in the air like smoke. Give me audiences who leave the theater arguing, unsettled, changed in ways they won’t understand for days or years. Give me the plays that ask: who are we, really, when the ordinary world cracks open?

That’s the only theater worth making. Everything else is just noise pretending to be music.

There is a moment in every rehearsal room when the sacred reveals itself. Not through grand gestures or proclamations, but in the quiet space between breath and word, between what is remembered and what must be forgotten in order to survive.

At Dartmouth, in a residency graciously provided by New York Theatre Workshop, I was granted the privilege of directing two souls who carry within their bodies the entire archaeology of a vanished world: Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy. I gave them three pages of Ionesco’s Delirium for Two and two and a half days to discover what emerges when displacement meets artistry in the laboratory of temporary things.

The Cartography of Exile

When an artist leaves their homeland, they do not simply change locations. They enter a different relationship with memory itself. Chulpan, who was the Meryl Streep of Russia, whose name alone could sell out any theater in Moscow, and Andrey, who moved from the hockey rink to the stage and found his calling there—they carry within their bodies the entire architecture of a lost world.

But exile is not merely about what is left behind. It is about what emerges in the space of loss. In that Dartmouth rehearsal room, working with window shades and found objects, they were not trying to recreate Russia. They were discovering what remains when everything familiar is stripped away.

The turtle and the snail in Ionesco’s text—these creatures who carry their homes with them—become more than metaphor in the hands of displaced artists. They become autobiography.

The Liturgy of Survival

What struck me most profoundly was the quality of attention these artists brought to each moment. When Andrey removed the high-heeled shoe and placed it before Chulpan, again and again, in an endless circle of offering and refusal—this was not theatrical invention. This was the muscle memory of care learned in extremis.

People who have lost everything understand that survival is a collaborative art. The argument between Ionesco’s characters, which in other hands might become mere absurdist comedy, here revealed its true nature: a duet of mutual salvation. He tries to save her by silencing her before she speaks dangerous truths, as Chulpan does in life. She tries to save his soul by refusing to let him forget those same truths.

This is the deeper architecture of love—not harmony, but the willingness to fight for each other’s continued existence.

The Theater of the Found Object

Chulpan, who once commanded the resources of Russia’s greatest theaters, and Andrey, who learned to transform himself from athlete to artist, now create with whatever materials they find. This is not poverty of means but richness of imagination. When you have lost your institutional support, your cultural context, your native audience, what remains is the essential: the actor’s body, the director’s vision, the eternal human need to connect.

A Mardi Gras necklace becomes internal organs. A broken mirror holds an entire philosophy of fractured identity. White powder transforms from construction dust to the ash of bombed buildings, depending on the angle of light, the quality of attention brought to bear.

The Sound of Generators

There was a moment when a dog barked somewhere in the rehearsal room that was leashed to a chair, and Chulpan immediately unleashed the dog and used the leash as a generator crank. Andrey instantly transformed his lines into the rumble of a generator—those machines that have become the heartbeat of Ukrainian cities, keeping life alive when the power grid fails.

This is what exile teaches: how to hear the present through the filter of inherited trauma, how every sound carries the ghost of what it might mean elsewhere. The artist in displacement lives simultaneously in multiple geographies—the room where they stand, the country they remember, the uncertain territory of tomorrow.

The Architecture of Temporary Sanctuaries

Watching this work develop, I was reminded of something Andrei Tarkovsky wrote about the particular responsibility of the artist in dark times. We do not create in order to escape history, but to metabolize it. To transform the raw material of catastrophe into something that can be shared, held, understood.

Chulpan and Andrey, in their fearless commitment to the work, created what I can only call a temporary sanctuary. For thirty minutes in that small room, the audience was invited into a space where the complexities of displacement, war, and survival could be encountered not through reportage or political argument, but humans saving each other through love and presence.

What Remains

In the end, what moved me most was not the political content of their situation, but the quality of presence they brought to each moment of the work. Chulpan, who once had Latvia bestow its highest honors upon her after she learned their language in exile, and Andrey, who reinvented himself completely when the world shifted beneath his feet—they reminded us that identity is not what you lose when you leave home, but what you discover you can create anywhere.

Theater, at its most essential, is an act of faith—the belief that gathering together in a room to witness stories can somehow matter in the face of all that threatens to destroy our capacity for empathy, for wonder, for hope.

Chulpan and Andrey, with their window blinds and courage, reminded us that this faith is not naive. It is the most practical magic we possess.

In times of dissolution, we do not make theater in spite of the chaos. We make theater because chaos demands witnesses, because survival requires imagination, because the human experience insists on being told, again and again, until someone understands what it costs to remain human when being human becomes almost impossible.

This is the territory we explore, one rehearsal room at a time.

Written in gratitude for New York Theatre Workshop, Dartmouth College, and all institutions that create space for necessary experiments in the democracy of imagination.

We needed a name for a children’s studio.

That’s all it was. My wife at the time was starting classes. Teaching Russian language through theater. Something small. Something to build with.

It had to be easy to remember. Childish. Fun. Something connected to the world we came from.

There was a song by Alla Pugachova. Everyone in the Russian-speaking world knows this song. A melancholy song about a harlequin. Arlekin.

We thought: that works.

We weren’t thinking about centuries. We weren’t thinking about tradition. We were thinking about a name that children could pronounce and parents would recognize.

That’s how it started.

My wife wanted to act. Not teach. Act.

So I gathered some friends. Russian speakers. Amateurs. I asked for nine months.

At the end of nine months, we had a theater. Those nine months are still going.

We called it Arlekin Players Theatre. Close enough to Arlekin Studio that people would confuse them. Good for business. Survival thinking.

I have since divorced the wife. She kept Arlekin Studio. I kept the theater. People still confuse us.

The Harlequin is one of the oldest figures in theater.

The court jester. The fool who stands before the king and says what no one else can say. The outsider protected by his mask.

The original Arlecchino, the Italian one from commedia dell’arte, was an immigrant worker. Displaced. His patched costume meant poverty. Meant: I don’t belong here.

The skomorokhi in Russia. Medieval performers. Satirists in masks. The Tsar had them flogged. The tradition went underground and became Russian theater itself.

I knew some of this. Vaguely. The way you know things without holding them.

But I wasn’t thinking about any of it when we chose the name. I was thinking about Alla Pugachova. I was thinking about something a child could say.

And yet.

A company of immigrants. Outsiders with accents. People who don’t quite fit.

Making theater that asks dangerous questions. Theater that speaks what is difficult to speak. Theater that lives in the pauses.

The name we grabbed for practical reasons turned out to describe exactly what we were becoming.

How does that happen?

The jester sees things.

That’s the job. Not to be smarter. Just to stand in a different place. The courtiers are inside the game. They have positions to protect. The fool has nothing to protect. So the fool sees.

The outsider sees what has become invisible to everyone inside.

I came from somewhere else. The rules here that everyone follows without thinking, I can still see them. They haven’t disappeared yet. Maybe they never will.

This is what we bring. Not answers. Questions. The willingness to say: what if we looked at this differently?

The jester’s privilege was never free. Jesters were exiled. Flogged. Sometimes executed. The ones who saw too clearly carried a weight that others couldn’t understand.

There is a painting of Stańczyk, the Polish jester. The court is dancing behind him. He sits alone in the corner. He has just received news of a military defeat that no one else cares about yet.

The melancholy of seeing.

I think names choose us.

We reach for something. Something simple, something nearby. And we don’t realize what we’re reaching for. The name sits there, waiting. It knows more than we do.

Years later, you look back and think: how did I know?

I didn’t. The name knew.

Fifteen years.

A children’s studio became a theater. A song became a lineage. A word chosen for convenience became an identity.

-Arlekin!

The jester. The immigrant. The fool who sees because he stands outside.

We didn’t choose it.

It was already waiting.

— Igor

www.arlekinplayers.com

My father was shaving. I was standing in the hallway. He looked out from the bathroom, razor in hand, foam on his face, and said: By the way, you’re Jewish. Then he continued to shave.

Kyiv. Late 1980s. I was nine years old. I had never heard this word before. Where am I Jewish? What part of me? I didn’t ask. He didn’t explain. The moment passed like a small strange bird through an open window. I am still trying to understand where it landed.

Years later I made a play about immigrants. I wanted a real baggage carousel on stage—the kind you stand around at airports, watching suitcases circle and circle. Everyone said it was impossible. We found one in Rhode Island and hauled it up to the second floor of our theater in Needham, MA. Because this is where we live, I explained. We left but we never arrived. We are here, in America, but we are still standing at the baggage claim. Waiting for our valuables. And some of them never come.

This is what it means to be an immigrant. This in-between. This unsettled soul between worlds. Dybbuks.

I sold cell phones at Singular Wireless. I knocked on doors with yellow page advertisements—you carry a bag and travel from business to business. Then mortgages. I passed my exam, became a broker. I was earning. I was surviving.

But inside? A hunger that had no name.

My friend Misha, who worked with me at Mass Capital Mortgage, once told me a Russian proverb: No matter how much you feed the wolf, he always looks into the forest.

We were sitting in the office, surrounded by loan applications and interest rates. No amount of commission checks could stop me from turning my head toward those dark trees.

So I emailed every artistic director in Boston. Every single one.

Zero response.

My grandfather’s name was Fleishman. In the Soviet Union, it became Golyak. Less Jewish. Safer. This is what we learn: to scrub ourselves. To make the edges softer. To tiptoe through rooms as if the floor might break.

We left Kyiv when I was eleven. We left because of antisemitism—the thing that followed our people for centuries, the thing we thought we could outrun. Vienna, then Rome, then Boston. Waiting at each station for permission to exist.

And in America? I emailed. I waited. I had already learned to shrink.

The immigrant does not know the invisible rules. We don’t know that you call again. That you nag. We don’t know that you invite people for coffee. We stand at the edge of rooms, watching, and the watching becomes a kind of hiding. We wait for permission that was never ours to receive.

I am in New York this week. Hanukkah begins tonight.

And this morning, in Sydney, on Bondi Beach, gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration. Sixteen dead. A twelve-year-old girl. A rabbi. More than a thousand people had gathered to light the first candle, and instead there was slaughter.

On the first day of Hanukkah.

The Festival of Lights.

This is not new. This is the oldest story. We fled Kyiv because of this. We fled Poland before that. We fled Spain, Germany, Russia, everywhere. The hatred follows. It waits. It finds us at the beach, at the synagogue, at the celebration.

And still we light candles.

I am thinking about the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. Twenty-one identical apartments, three hundred twenty-five square feet each. The largest family they ever documented living in one? Sixteen people.

No running water until 1912. Outhouses in the backyard. In New York City. In the twentieth century.

Jewish immigrants. Fleeing. Arriving. Building. Persisting.

You walk through those rooms and you understand: we have always been fleeing. And we have always been building anyway.

The same hands that packed suitcases in the night also opened shops in the morning. The same people who ran from pogroms also raised children who raised children who raised me.

This is the inheritance. Flight and persistence. Both. Always both.

Something is shifting for me now.

For years, I sent emails into the void. For years, I learned that the doors were not for me.

And now—I don’t fully understand it—there are people saying yes. People at the Met Opera signing up for this blog. People traveling to see the work I make for my new home.

A friend once told me about his mentor, a man named Ron. He asked Ron: why did you take that first meeting with me all those years ago? Was I persuasive on the phone? And Ron said: No. My mother taught me when I was a kid—if somebody asks for your help, you help them. So I meet with everyone who calls me.

But you only get a second meeting if I think you’re really good. Everybody gets a free first meeting. You got the second meeting. That’s the important part.

If somebody asks for your help, you help them.

I think about all the emails I sent that went unanswered. I think about the years of silence. And I think about the people now—these extraordinary, beautiful people—who are saying yes. Who are lighting candles in the darkness. Who are, in their own way, keeping the oil burning longer than it should.

This is the miracle of Hanukkah. Not that the darkness ends. The darkness does not end—it is happening right now, in Sydney, in a thousand places we cannot name.

The miracle is that the light persists anyway.

One day of oil. Eight days of flame.

Theater, for me, is about widening. That’s all it does. It tries to widen the perspective so that there is a chance—just a chance—of not getting stuck within a certain mindset. So that maybe, possibly, the attack that is always developing can be seen before it arrives.

Not by preaching. By widening. By showing how good people can do unbelievably horrible things and also something beautiful and unexpected. Both. By showing that the hatred is not somewhere far away in some distant past. It is here. It is in us. It is in the people who play soccer together and sing together and then burn each other.

When we staged Witness—our play about Jewish refugees turned away from America—a gunman was holding a rabbi hostage in Colleyville, Texas. We incorporated the live news feed into the performance.

When we were preparing Our Class—our play about Polish classmates who become murderers—October 7th happened.

And now Sydney. On the first night of Hanukkah.

The work keeps finding the darkness. Or the darkness keeps finding the work. I don’t know which.

Tonight the first candle will be lit. Tomorrow two. And so on, until eight flames push back against the December darkness.

Sixteen people will not light candles tonight. A twelve-year-old girl will not grow up. A rabbi will not bless another congregation.

And still we light candles.

Because this is what we do. This is what we have always done. In the shtetls before the pogroms. In the tenements of the Lower East Side. In Sydney tomorrow night, I am certain, despite everything.

Someone will strike a match.

For an immigrant, to be here—really here, contributing, mattering—still feels like a miracle. Oil that should not have lasted. Light that should not have persisted.

But it does. We do.

To the people in New York who are opening doors. To the people who say yes when the world says no. To the people who take the meeting and offer the second one. To everyone who lights a candle knowing that the darkness has not ended and may never end.

Thank you.

And to those in Sydney. To the sixteen. May your memory be a blessing.

Happy Hanukkah.

— Igor