Photos of Elly Bernstein-Porges & Felix Porges                                Photo: Dan Pinkerton
 courtesy of the Prokeš family                                               

Why We Laugh:  A Terezín Cabaret

 based on an original cabaret by
Felix Porges, Vítězslav Horpatzky, Pavel Weisskopf and Pavel Stránský

by Kira Obolensky
director Hayley Finn, composer/music director Craig Harris,
translator and dramaturg Lisa Peschel

featuring Julie Kurtz, Elise Langer, Ryan Lindberg and Skyler Nowinski

In the World War II Jewish Ghetto at Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt), four young Czech Jews created an escape from the ghetto while never leaving its walls. By setting their cabaret, “Laugh with Us,” in postwar Prague--a Prague identical to the one they remembered from the late 1930s--the performers simultaneously returned to the world they missed and expressed their hopes for a postwar future. They also engaged with the ghetto itself: by “looking back” with humor upon their time in Terezín, they converted the most terrifying events of their present into a source of laughter rather than fear.

“Why We Laugh” combines scenes and songs from the original cabaret with new scenes that reflect upon a scholar’s attempts to imagine how that original cabaret might have been performed. As the characters in the cabaret look to the future, and a contemporary scholar looks to the past, each confronts the other with difficult questions--why did the Terezín prisoners laugh, and what does that laughter mean to us today, knowing what we know about their history?

In June of 2011, Step in Time Theater took “Why We Laugh” to the Czech Republic. In Terezin the group performed on June 15, 2011 at The Rafael Schächter Institute for the Arts and Humanities. In Prague the group performed at The Nine Gates Festival of Czech-German-Jewish Culture on June 18, 2011.