ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
Shot List—A mother publishes a harrowing wartime memoir. Her daughter tries to reconcile the recollections. A stranger enters their lives. And somewhere else, two actors make a movie. A new play about adapting humanity’s most horrific stories.
Content Warning: Shot List includes discussions of disturbing content and mature themes.
Eric Marlin (he/him)—Playwright
Ilana Khanin (she/her)—Director
Luke Daniel White (he/him)—Dramaturg
Max Mooney (he/him/she/her)—Stage Manager and Assistant Director
Annie Hoeg (she/her)—Performer
Paul Lazar (he/him)—Performer
Linda Mancini (she/her)—Performer
Constance Shulman (she/her)—Performer
Mari Vial-Golden (she/they)—Performer
About the Artists
Eric Marlin (he/him) has been produced and developed by the Public Theater, Theatertreffen Stückemarkt, Ars Nova’s ANT Fest, the Civilians, Dutch Kills Theater Company, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Tank, Dixon Place, Samuel French, HOT! Festival, Exquisite Corpse Company, and PTP/NYC. Winner of the Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival. Finalist for SPACE at Ryder Farm, the Jewish Plays Project, FMM Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language, and two-time finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Former member of the Civilians’ R&D Group and resident artist at Montclair’s New Works Initiative. He has worked as a producer and stage manager for the Bushwick Starr, New Georges, WP Theater, Red Bull Theatre, CTown, PTP/NYC, Public Theater, New Ohio Ice Factory Festival, and PRELUDE. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop. BA: Bennington College.
Ilana Khanin (she/her) is a theatre director. Her work has been developed and presented at Ars Nova ANT Fest, HERE, New Ohio’s Ice Factory, Governors Island, Joust Theater Co, The Tank, The Brick, Primary Stages, Theaterlab, Judson, Dixon Place, Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, Atlantic Stage 2, Center at West Park. She has worked for Lila Neugebauer, Lee Sunday Evans, Annie-B Parson, Meghan Finn and Daniel Fish, at venues including BAM, Old Vic, Deutsches Theater, LaMaMa, Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb. Former Artist-in-Residence at Montclair State University/New Works Initiative. She also researches and writes about the intersection of art and crypto technology, with the support of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. ilanakhanin.com
BARYSHNIKOV ARTS RESIDENCY STORY
SHOT LIST
By Alisa Solomon
The space looked familiar: Like just about every rehearsal room I have been in over the decades, the sixth-floor studio at Baryshnikov Arts Center was dominated by an extended table with people seated along only one side of it. It took me a while to realize, though, that something was askew. Usually, that work surface is the sanctum of stage managers, directors, playwrights, dramaturgs, designers, producers—all the personnel scrutinizing actors who labor away on the other side.
But here, during a final rehearsal of Shot List—Eric Marlin’s play for his BAC Open artist’s residency in collaboration with the director Ilana Khanin—it was the cast who sat in an orderly row behind the table, as if they were the ones probing the best means and methods of putting together a show. The set literally turned the table, placing the play’s characters in the position of professional storytellers at work. And that makes perfect sense because—as the play slowly reveals—the characters are indeed crafting a narrative, trying one approach, then another, and then one more as a Mother, her adult Daughter, and a Stranger, sitting at the stage-left end of the table recount and revise versions of their past, and two Filmmakers draft and tweak a screenplay at its stage-right end.
As the play proceeded, with scenes alternating between the two ends of the long table, I began to wonder about a connection between them: Were the Filmmakers producing a movie about the unresolved action playing out among the Mother, Daughter, and Stranger? If so, was one of them a double for one of those three women—and if so, which? And which rendering of the stage-left story was the real one?
I was meant to be perplexed–because the story in question involves one of the most mediated events of modern history—the Shoah. Shot List was provoking me to ask whether—and if so, how—one can tell, and more important, receive, a Holocaust story directly. Is it possible to avoid the tropes, platitudes, and at times, cynical uses, that have barnacled this cataclysm over the last 80 years, through blockbuster movies, books, plays, museum exhibits, memorial sites, and political rhetoric?
In Marlin’s play, the Mother is (or at least says she is) a survivor of Auschwitz who has never told her Daughter about this scarring experience, but, as the play opens, she has just published a memoir and has been giving book talks and TV interviews for the public. The Daughter yearns for her Mother to tell her face-to-face and personally about her past, even as the Stranger claims that past as her own, accusing the Mother of stealing her story. Meanwhile, the stage-right Filmmakers are drafting a script that vaguely describes a woman held captive by a man wearing an armband and holding a gun.
Eventually—and startlingly—the invisible barrier between the two ends of the table is breached, and one actor steps in for another on the opposite side. It seems we have been watching the Daughter trying—with imperfect, contaminated tools—to assemble the testimony her mother would not share.
Silence/saturation.
Personal trauma/collective history.
The public necessity of remembering/the personal desire to forget.
Historical uniqueness/universal horror.
Any artist approaching Holocaust material will collide with these antimonies. Marlin decided to drive into them headlong. “I almost never encountered a work about the Holocaust that didn’t anger or frustrate me in some way,” he told me. “I didn’t understand my own discomfort. That was a sign that there was something worth picking at.”
Like the literary and dramatic works addressing the Holocaust that I most appreciate, Marlin wrestled within his play with the unresolvable nature of those antinomies and with the question of representation itself. In their very form, such works disrupt worn-out, over-simplistic, sentimental depictions of Holocaust stories. Their centers cannot hold: narrative conventions explode, linear plot-building twists and tangles, authorial voice breaks, seemingly separate realms collapse into confusion.
I’m thinking, for example, of Ann Michaels’s lyrical and searing novel, Fugitive Pieces: The narrator, Jakob, hid as a child while his family was taken away and slaughtered; rescued and raised by a Greek geologist, he grows up to become a poet, forever haunted by his sister who perished, forever trying to compose a memoir from the shards of thin memories, books, others’ stories, books, and the slippery rigor of words. In the book’s last third Jakob is abruptly replaced by a different narrator, Ben, a child of reticent survivors; as a scholar, Ben becomes obsessed with Jakob’s “biography of longing” and takes on his own effort to assemble the story. Like the accounts both men seek to relay, the structure of Michaels’s novel totters potently on the fault-lines between history and memory.
I’m thinking, too, of Art Spiegelman’s pivotal Maus, which made brilliant use of the distancing devices the comics form provides to portray his survivor father’s reminiscences of Auschwitz and his own guilt-wracked process of engaging it. Rendering the figures in this narrative as rodents, cats, and dogs—and grappling with his father’s shortcomings—Spiegelman swept away the sentimentality that often clings to survivors’ tales, making room to explore the emotional storm of being so intimately and powerfully shaped by his parents’ experiences that they seeped into his own dreams, recollections, sense of self—what the scholar Marianne Hirsch named “postmemory”.
Theater—like comics, whose images, captions, and speech bubbles can comment on or even contradict each other—has a built-in facility for calling self-conscious attention to its representational strategies. “History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space,” Michaels writes in Fugitive Pieces. “Every moment is two moments.” That duality can be physically manifested on a stage—when, for example, characters from different eras simultaneously occupy the same space or, more subtly—or more grandly—when discrepant emotions or events live side-by-side.
I’m remembering the shocking moment in Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto in which the audience’s perspective is upended: are we watching Sobol’s play about the performance troupe that formed in the Vilna Ghetto before it was liquidated in 1943—or a play that the troupe is presenting? In Lisa Kron’s one-woman play, 2.5 Minute Ride, horror and humor disjunctively co-exist as she recounts a family outing to an amusement park where her elderly father insists on riding the scariest rollercoasters, as well as a tour she takes with him to Auschwitz, where his parents perished after he fled Germany as a child on the Kindertransport. Donald Margulies’s unsettling Model Apartment steams ahead on a revelatory excess of toxic emotion as an elderly couple, survivors both, move from Brooklyn to Florida, soon pursued by the troubled daughter they sought to escape: Obese and disturbed, she is both the repository and the reminder of their own trauma, which the mother, for one, faultily processes by making up stories about her concentration camp relationship with Anne Frank.
Different as they are from each other, these artists work amid the rubble of the representational structures that have crumbled under the weight of traumatic history—and they point to the wreckage. With Shot List, Eric Marlin is offering his own version of this important gesture.
Top photo by Maria Baranova.