As the generation that lived through World War II slowly ages out of existence, memories of the conflict that killed millions of soldiers, civilians, and war prisoners, including those lost to the Holocaust, are more frequently rendered as artistic representations rather than firsthand accounts. The war affected so many people all over the world that stories of the era offer points of view as varied as the people who survived to tell their story. One such example is Ensemble Theatre Company’s upcoming production of Everything Is Illuminated, a stage adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed novel of the same name, directed by Jonathan Fox.
This play follows a young writer, Jonathan (Jeremy Kahn), on a pilgrimage through Ukraine to return to Trochenbrod, a long-ago shtetl that was converted into a ghetto during Nazi occupation. Jonathan’s grandfather was housed there and subsequently saved from annihilation by a woman lost to time. Their Ukrainian guide, Alex (Matt Wolpe), provides a dramatically different worldview (and comic foil) to Jonathan’s American college student and is accompanied on the road trip by his own grandfather (Adrian Sparks). “It’s very funny in some parts, and very dark and gripping in some parts,” said Fox, who describes Act I as a bizarre road trip through the Ukraine, and Act II as the reckoning with the ghosts of the past.
“There are moments where characters recount the horrors they experienced during the Holocaust,” said Fox, “but at one point, Alex says to Jonathan, ‘You think you guys are the only ones who have suffered; there are people suffering today.’ … The story is larger than the Holocaust.” Similarly, Kahn encourages audiences to think of Everything Is Illuminated as more than a play about the Jewish experience: “It’s not just a Jewish story,” he said. “It’s about how everyone has the right to live, and the right to live in the way that they do without having to apologize for it.”