ART IMITATES LIFE
Michael Rubenfeld performs in a documentary-style theatre piece about family dynamics,
In the summer of 2012, theatre artist and producer Michael Rubenfeld had an idea: to take a trip to Poland with his mother, Mary Berchard, and his longtime collaborator Sarah Garton Stanley.
The goal of the trip was to “work out some things” in his fractious relationship with his mom. Berchard’s parents, Polish Jews, survived the Holocaust; she was born in Sweden and Rubenfeld in Canada, and neither had been to Poland before.
Stanley loved the idea; she and Rubenfeld work, as he explains it, by “taking our problems and trying to resolve them through theatrical research,” so this was right up their alley.
For Berchard, not so much. “I didn’t like it at all, didn’t want any part of it,” she says. “I just thought it was silly. If we have problems, why do you have to go across the Atlantic to fix them?”
Mother and son are talking to me on Skype from Berlin, where the show they ended up making, We Keep Coming Back, played at the English Theatre in Kreuzberg before opening at Toronto’s Factory Theatre this week. Clearly something shifted for Berchard. “Michael’s enthusiasm was just so intense and he just felt so strongly that this would be a breakthrough. I think he saw things that I really didn’t see initially. So I trusted him.” We Keep Coming Back is a form of documentary theatre in which Rubenfeld and Berchard play themselves, along with the Polish author Katka Reszke, who was their translator on the Poland trip and became an important part of the story. In the semi-scripted, semi-improvised show, the three narrate their experience of the run-up to the trip, the trip itself and its aftermath, along with video footage of their experiences.
A goal of the production is to work through family memory toward a clearer understanding of Poland and their relationship to it. Berchard’s mother, now 96, used to talk about her experiences in Auschwitz “incessantly,” says Berchard. “She would wake up in the middle of the night screaming with horrible nightmares and my father would never, ever talk about the war” (her father is since deceased).
What Berchard heard from her mother was that “all Poles were anti-Semites and that they would kill you for a bag of sugar.” This was an actual family story, Rubenfeld explains: “that my grandmother’s mother was essentially given up in exchange for a bag of sugar … Whether it’s true or not, we don’t know, but that’s what my grandmother would tell us.”
In exploring these issues, Rubenfeld, Berchard and Stanley found that there is a contemporary revival of Judaism in Poland and that’s what led them to Reszke, who has written a book on the subject.
Creating the show has helped Rubenfeld process that his family “are actually Polish people, despite what we had been taught growing up … one of the stereotypes is that Jews and Poles were entirely separate all the time, which I learned was not true. In fact, there were many Jewish people who were quite patriotic about the country of Poland.”
This concept of a mother and adult son playing themselves onstage may remind audiences of Why Not Theatre’s welltravelled A Brimful of Asha, in which Ravi Jain and his mother Asha offer their varying accounts of her attempts (along with Ravi’s dad) to pair him off in an arranged marriage. The comparison “drives me completely crazy,” says Rubenfeld, acknowledging that “everyone brings it up.”
In fact, there are numerous international productions involving artists and their parents these days, and Rubenfeld sees more commonality between his show and the Irish company Brokentalkers’ Have I No Mouth and Belgian-Iranian performer Sachli Gholamalizad’s A Reason to Talk (which played at Toronto’s Theatre Centre in 2016) than Brimful of Asha, because those shows are more squarely about unresolved traumas between parent and child.
We Keep Coming Back is “about what actually happened versus what we think happened,” says Rubenfeld — what happened on their trip, but also what happened in the past. It’s “a way to look at how trauma has clouded or clouds our capacity to just be in conversation with reality.”
Such difficulties manifested themselves in a very visceral way when they first arrived in Warsaw (after a number of years of delay in which Berchard coped with health concerns) and she found herself unable to leave the airport. She “just stopped,” says Rubenfeld. “She froze.”
As they travelled, “I came to realize how traumatized I was,” she says. “I didn’t get it before. It was just the sound of Poland was enough to make the hair on my neck stand up.”
This notion of trauma as a circular, continual return to its source was part of the inspiration for the show’s title, says Rubenfeld. “It’s partly about the coming back to family … us coming back to each other, this kind of separation and return.”
To say that this production has transformed their lives would not be an overstatement. During the research phase Rubenfeld met Magda Koralewska, a graphic designer, educator and community activist. The pair married in 2015 and Rubenfeld now splits his time between Poland and Toronto (and, for the past two summers, Edinburgh, where he is executive artistic producer of the CanadaHub performance showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe). The couple’s first child, a son, is due in mid-December.
Berchard has now visited Poland five times and, health permitting, will go again for her grandson’s bris. While not thrilled that her son has moved to a different continent, Berchard says they get along better now. “Our relationship is far more relaxed than it ever was … I think we’re seeing outcomes.” Factory Theatre presents Selfconscious Productions’ We Keep Coming Back from today to Nov. 25 in its Mainspace Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. See factorytheatre.ca or call 416-504-9971 for information.
Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2