From The Director

Nancy Kindelan: The director’s vision

As the director of the documentary play Children of Drancy, I was immediately struck by the story – a compelling and powerful narrative with disturbingly haunting images told by internees whose voices had been silenced for far too long. As I mined the play’s historical context, considered the ideas embedded in the play’s social milieu, and reviewed visual images which depicted past and present – day views of Drancy, I was struck by how, some sixty-plus years after the liberation, the dark impulses of past atrocities continue to reverberate throughout contemporary French culture. I discovered that the lack of clear information and the silence surrounding the roundup and deportation of Jews with the complicity of French authorities and police has continued to obscure the truth about France’s collaboration with the German occupiers, affect the French national consciousness, and promote anti-Semitism in France. I was particularly challenged by the Narrator’s opening lines: “The Nazi period came close to taking all humanity with it into that darkness. I hold that the only way to dissipate this darkness is to illuminate it with the stark light of truth, without exaggerating anything.” Thus, my charge as the play’s director became clear: The story must be told. The undigested truth about the internment camp known as Drancy will be conveyed through compelling theatrical images that evoke its forgotten world.

My work began with a question: How can the idea of “living memory” be created on stage? I began by selecting important informational data that would aid the audience in confronting Drancy’s historical past. Shortly thereafter, I found the commanding image that defined the play’s mise en scène: the production would call to mind images of Drancy’s often-closed boxcar museum. Opening the museum and bringing it to life gave its silenced spirits the opportunity to speak. Eventually, the production’s mise en scène (the set and costumes were designed by two undergraduate theatre majors) consisted of two levels of reality. The first consisted of representational artifacts that one would find appropriate for a museum located at Drancy – the Jewish prisoners’ shoes, discarded clothing, abandoned letters and hand-made toys. The second consisted of presentational set pieces that theatrically suggested the reality of the camp. For example, the staircases that the detainees (young and old) climbed to large dorm – like overcrowded rooms where they slept (crammed together in multi-tiered bunks) and where children used to play were imaginatively created by a collection of ladders of various sizes and shapes. These ladders indicated different locations throughout the internment camp. The museum-like setting included pictures (large blown-up duplications of Georges Horan’s realistic charcoal drawings of Drancy’s environs). However, these artifacts were not hung in an orderly fashion; instead, they were carelessly scattered throughout the mise en scène. Dust covers were thrown over the museum’s objects and dim lighting created ominous shadows suggesting the interior of the forgotten museum. Hidden throughout the closed museum, behind overturned furniture and fallen pictures, were the actors who, at first, appeared as ghost-like figures and eventually gave voice to the play’s stories. By opening the museum, the “stark light of truth” emerged through a collection of images that both historically documented and imaginatively suggested the “living memory” of Drancy.

The artistic process seemed to have a worthy and accomplishable direction until I realized how impossible it was to stage the realities of the Holocaust. I found myself asking: How does one stage, as is suggested in the dramaturgical program, “children, women, men, fathers, and mothers being treated like a lowly herd of animals, families being separated and sent to unknown destinations,” the chaos of children taking care of children, the uncertainty of day-to-day life, the fear of the unknown, incessant hunger and so forth? Quite frankly, I didn’t know how to stage horror, fear, degradation, hunger, despair, loneliness, strength, and hope-against-all-odds in a way that would do justice to the devastating unimaginable reality of the Shoah. I discovered a form of fantastical realism was needed to recreate events that are beyond conceivable and rational. Throughout rehearsal the undergraduate cast members explored the play’s emotional context through improvisations that resulted in numerous physical moments that suggested imagistically the meta-theatrical aspects of the play’s historical narrative. Some of the images that offered access to the play’s soul, inner meanings, and emotional heartbeat were found through the addition of a dancer (who conveyed through movement a language of emotions that defied rational discourse), others were suggested through the presentation of études (improvised stories that illustrated through theatrical movement and frozen tableaux the play’s inner emotional dialogue of families being separated and sent to unknown destinations and images of hunger and hope). Finally, an original score was composed to enhance, through music and sound, the inexpressible tension of a world gone mad.