"To Paint the Earth" featured in Jewish Week

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Suddenly, resistance is in the cultural air. From the text panels of a local Holocaust museum, to the Off Broadway stage, to the Hollywood screen, curators, writers and directors are finding a rich vein of heroism in the fight that outmanned and under-armed Jews put up during the Shoah.

Even, surprisingly, writers and composers of musicals.

Violent rebellions and bloody battles are not usually the stuff of musicals. But for writer Daniel Levin and composer Jonathan Portera, whose first musical, “To Paint the Earth,” is based on the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the drama of Jews resisting the Nazis is tailor-made for musical treatment.

Directed by Michael Bush and cast with Broadway veterans, “To Paint the Earth” will be presented next week
as part of the fifth annual New York Musical Theater Festival. In 2004, the musical won a prestigious Richard Rodgers Development Award, which is given by a committee chaired by Stephen Sondheim.
Based in large part on memoirs of members of the Jewish Underground in Poland, “To Paint the Earth” comes on the heels of the major exhibition on The Resistance at the Museum of Jewish Heritage,  and just a few months before the opening of a Hollywood film (starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schrieber) about the Bielski Brothers, who established a partisan camp in the forests of Belarus. At the same time, “Irena’s Vow,” starring Tovah Feldshuh, a new play about a non-Jewish housekeeper rescuing Jews from the Nazis as part of the Polish Underground, is in previews Off Broadway.

Such renewed attention to the phenomenon of resistance suggests that the pervasive stereotype of Jews led meekly to slaughter is coming under fire from various angles.

The current hard economic times may give such heroic stories a particular resonance, says Deborah Dwork, who teaches at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and is the author, with Robert Jan van Pelt, of the forthcoming book, “Flight from the Reich.” Dwork sees the explosion of interest in resistance as a reflection of the malaise that many Americans are feeling. “We are at a pretty bleak moment right now,” she said. “Just as during the Depression, when the American people felt frustrated and powerless and the fantasy figure of Superman came into being. These stories of resistance are also about courage, heroism, and fighting against all odds.”

For Levin, 32, “To Paint the Earth” is a kind of Jewish version of his all-time favorite musical, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s “Les Misérables,” about a group of colorful characters caught up in the tumult of the French Revolution. The project began seven years ago when Levin and Portera were fellow students at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and were assigned to write an original musical. They chose a “Les Miz”-like subject, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which a group of several hundred young Polish Jews, dying of hunger and awaiting deportation to the death camps, took up smuggled weapons and held out for almost a month before finally being crushed by the Third Reich.

The musical focuses on a self-absorbed painter, Chaim Wotosky (Scott Richard Foster, who was in “Brooklyn”), an employee of a German factory, run by Jurgen Hening (Steven Strafford), that manufactures brushes used to paint Nazis planes and tanks. Chaim falls in love with a teenage runner for the Jewish Underground, Mona Betrovicz (Jane Pfitsch, who was in “Company” and “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”). Through his relationship with Mona, Chaim has a political awakening, symbolized by his painting a grand anti-Nazi mural.

The protagonist thus ultimately finds himself allied with Maier Burnich (David Nathan Perlow), the leader of Hashomer Hatzair, the Socialist-Zionist Youth Movement that took up arms against the Nazis. Burnich is based loosely on Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of Hashomer Hatzair’s organization in Warsaw, while Mona is inspired by well-known survivor Vladka Meed, who was a courier for the Jewish Fighting Organization of Warsaw.

Levin recalled that he first learned of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising when he was in Hebrew school in his hometown of Chevy Chase, Md. “I clenched my fist because I was so proud that they had fought back,” he said. When he began listening and going to musicals, he said, he preferred “serious ones, not the song and dance stuff. I wanted to be taken away — to have my guts ripped out.” Yet he insisted that “To Paint the Earth” is filled with humor. “If the audience doesn’t feel that they can laugh, then we’re sunk,” he said. “It’s not just a dirge.”

When he started working with Portera on “To Paint the Earth,” Levin read voluminously about the subject, poring over memoirs from figures like Emmanuel Ringelblum, who established the famous Oneg Shabbat archive, and Yitzak Zuckerman, who escaped through the sewers to become one of the few survivors of the uprising.

Levin found that Jews naturally held a wide variety of theories about how to keep the community alive, as shown in a pivotal scene in the musical in which a rabbi, Abraham Chernowicz (Darin de Paul, who was in “Grinch”) counsels non-violence, while his son, Euphraim (Lee Zarrett), secretly makes weapons for the Jewish freedom fighters. Levin’s ultimate aim, he said, was to “show how these people coalesced.”
Portera, 29, who was born in Miami but grew up in Westchester, is often compared to Adam Guettel, the highly acclaimed composer of “A Light in the Piazza.” His decision in “To Paint the Earth,” Portera said, was “to give the text room to breathe” by adding rhythm and color, and to “paint time passing.” In writing the music, he said, he began by listening to a lot of Romantic Polish and Russian composers like Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Prokoviev.

But the songs in “To Paint the Earth” turned out to sound a lot more modern, such as “The Bicycle Song,” in which Chaim teaches Mona how to ride. It has the dissonance, melodic intricacy, and rapid moving notes that Sondheim, following Bach, made his trademark. And the ballad “Time,” in which a young mother sings about wanting to have more time with her son, could easily be taken for early Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Still, the composer said that “some of the hardest songs to write were the ones with the most beautiful imagery,” such as the soaring trio “Paint the Wall,” in which Chaim, Maier and Mona sing about each doing his or her own part to take charge of the seemingly hopeless situation.

The composer speculated that a movement toward more serious work is under way in the musical theater. “We’re seeing a shift into more dynamic responses to the state of the world, with darker shows, like ‘Spring Awakening,’” he said. “People aren’t just interested in escapism.”

Finding heroism in the Holocaust, he said, fills in a part of the story that is not often told. “The whole time period is colored with tragedy,” he conceded. “But why paint only a part of the picture?”

David Marwell, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, told The Jewish Week that the many ways in which Jews resisted the Nazis have been for the most part hidden from view. “For too long people have mistaken powerlessness for passivity,” he said.

The museum’s exhibit on The Resistance, which closed last Sunday, provided what Marwell called a “comprehensive view of a subject that has been little understood.” In conjunction with the exhibit, the museum sponsored a staged reading of a musical called “Warsaw,” written by John Atkins and William Wade, which also focused on the uprising. “Warsaw” was also performed at last year’s New York Music Festival.

In the end, Marwell noted, it may take works of art like “To Paint the Earth” to convey the real truth of the Shoah. “The notion that art is an imperfect vehicle for dealing with the Holocaust is false; in some cases, it may be the only way,” he concluded.

For Clark University’s Dwork, watching a stage production like “To Paint the Earth” gives us “a window into the strength that each one of us has.” She added that she is “really glad that we are confronted with historical narratives about people, like us, who acted morally in an immoral time. They took the next step; maybe we can too.”

“To Paint the Earth” runs at 37 Arts (450 W. 37th St. between Ninth and Tenth avenues). Performances are Saturday, Sept. 27, at 5 and 9 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 28, at 1 p.m., and Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 9 p.m. For tickets, $20, call Ovation Tix at (212) 352-3101.