By Mitchell Polonsky

I miss my grandparents a lot. After they died in 2020, I became compulsively drawn to whatever traces of their physical presence I could find: clothes (which, until recently, still smelled like them), anything they touched or used regularly (a cup, a pen, a fanny pack), photos (especially old ones), and voicemails (mostly brief, repetitive, mundane hellos, how-are-yous, thank-yous, etc.)

Several years later I started developing an experimental performance piece called Deadclass, Ohio with my company, The Goat Exchange, co-created by my brilliant directing partner Chloe Claudel and the extraordinary playwright Eliya Smith. We wanted to make a piece about my grandparents, or at least about my memory of them. They were Holocaust survivors from Krakow, but never really spoke about it—they preferred to focus on happier things. But towards the end of my grandmother’s life, and particularly as her memory began to deteriorate, it became clear that she was returning to memories of her childhood, and her survival, in a way that was very new to me. She began speaking in Polish and then German, a language we had never heard her speak, and began calling loved ones by the names of friends and family members who perished in the war. When my grandfather passed away in 2020, she seemed almost as overcome by the loss of a Holocaust survivor as she was by the loss of her husband of 71 years.

In Deadclass, Ohio, we weren’t interested in making a “Holocaust play,” or even a memory play per se. We weren’t interested in telling the miraculous stories of their survival or rehearsing traumas they would have preferred to leave buried. We were interested in the terrifying and beautiful ways memory travels between generations, the ways in which we carry the ghosts of our ancestors around with us.

Inspired by Polish director Tadeusz Kantor’s play The Dead Class, we decided to create a piece of theater that was in and of itself a kind of summoning or séance. We brought in many of those found objects and built ourselves a little makeshift cemetery out of them. We brought in actors to vocally recreate the verbatim voicemails using earpieces to channel the voices of my grandparents as precisely as possible. We started looping little pieces of music and text in unexpected ways, building a play that’s constantly doubling back on itself in endless elliptical loops. Theater tends to move forward in time, but memory isn’t so well behaved. Memory moves however it wants to. Memory, both within our own minds and across generations, doesn’t work in straight lines but in loops, and Deadclass, Ohio, is the closest we could come to capturing what remembering really feels like.

Deadclass, Ohio, runs at The Tank in New York City through March 23.

Mitchell Polonsky is a director, sound/media designer, and photographer from Ohio and the co-Artistic Director of The Goat Exchange with whom he has co-created more than 20 works.  He studied directing at Harvard and Trinity College in Dublin on a George J. Mitchell Fellowship and misses his grandparents very much. www.thegoatexchange.com

The Goat Exchange is an interdisciplinary performance company founded in 2016. We bring together artists from across disciplines to create live art, film, public installation, and experimental theater. We enjoy working with old films, new plays, verbatim transcripts, classic texts, and ladybugs. Our work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, incorporating wide-ranging influences from opera, dance, literature, classic cinema, vaudeville, slapstick, pop-culture, and public art. We have developed over 20 original productions in traditional theaters and a range of site-specific venues, from a museum gallery to a swimming pool to a football stadium to a kitchen sponge.

The other members of The Goat Exchange who contributed to Deadclass, Ohio and the blog, include:
Chloe Claudel, a director, actor, and choreographer and the co-Artistic Director of The Goat Exchange. She has performed in and co-directed more than 20 new works nationally and internationally at venues including La Mama, Ice Factory Festival, the American Repertory Theater, VAULT Festival, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, and in residency at BAM and Mercury Store. In addition to her work with The Goat Exchange she recently performed in Jerry Lieblich’s The Barbarians at La Mama and in Eric on Netflix. Chloe has a BFA in acting from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Eliya Smith, a writer from Ohio. Off-Broadway: Grief Camp at the Atlantic Theater Company. Other productions: Ice Factory Festival, HERE Arts Center, the American Repertory Theater, ISLE Theater Company. Awards/Support: Venturous Grant, O’Neill Semifinalist, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Phyllis Anderson Foundation. MFA Candidate UT Austin.