Reviews


THEATER •Nosferatu •Proof •Ginger Man •I Never Saw Another Butterfly •Twelfth Night FILM •Mission Impossible II •Dinosaur DANCE •Table Talk •John Jasperse CABARET •Lainie Kazan •Yanna Avis CD •The Wild Party	I Never Saw Another Butterfly Adapted from the play by Celeste Raspanti Review by Travis Baker By Geraldine Teagarden and Sharon Talbot Imagine a world where the boogyman walked by you everyday, and you had to salute him. A childhood where you have already been captured by monsters, and everyone you know, all of your friends and family, disappear. It is a place, not of make-believe, but of our own dark past. This is the world Raja, a young Jewish girl, has found herself in, in the Tom Cat Cohen production of I Never Saw Another Butterfly adapted by Geraldine Teagarden and Sharon Talbot. Set in the ghetto of Terazin, during the later years of WWII, it is the story of the children of this concentration camp, and the unspeakable horrors they lived with. It is a world of hunger, fear, desperation and faint hope. The children, professionally portrayed by the young ensemble, are cared for by their teacher Irena (Roslyn Cohn), and her assistant Renka (Micki Paley). They live in a small schoolroom, (ingeniously designed by Mark Symczak), and, being forbidden to actually learn anything, they play games, such as "Save a piece of bread for night", and "Hide extra sap under your nails". They also draw on scavenged paper, so as to preserve at least some part of themselves. Enter Raja, (Lisa Apatini in a fine performance), a young woman from Prague. She does not understand what has happened. Through the course of the play she will lose her parents, her brother, her teacher, and most of her friends. She will, however, as many did, survive, and live on, and remember. At its best, most powerful moments, I Never Saw Another Butterfly is disturbing, haunting, and deeply moving. When Ms. Paley, as Renka, tells of her former life, our hearts break. When Ms. Apatini, as Raja, speaks of the butterflies she will never again see, we weep. When the children sing, our joy is choked with tears. At intermission, there was not a dry eye in the place. Alas, these are moments, and most of them occur in the first act. Only a sorrowful scene between Raja and her first young love, Honza (Adam Rose), as he informs her that he too has been selected to go east, to Auschwitz, to death, has the dramatic push of the previous act. Rebecca Taylor does a fine job of direction. Unfortunately the play gets bogged down by information, too much, presented in too lecture-like a fashion. There is also some rather chunky dialogue; as the teacher, Ms. Cohn has some of the toughest lines to handle, and Joshua Fishbein, as Raja’s brother Pavel, gets a dud of a scene to play where he must inform Raja that their parents are dead. One would hope that Ms. Teagarden and Ms. Talbot will revisit this play, smooth out its rough spots and give the dialogue a more natural feel. For the story is an important one, and the moments of true tragedy within it are well worth the evening spent with these brave children and their living nightmares.

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