Behind the curtain, the war, the ghetto, the holocaust. It is Fanny Sarfati “responsibly” filling the entire stage in a vibrant, moving monologue, exhilarating for the story she tells, with variations of voice and tessitura, sometimes like the whisper of a soul approaching the last mile, others with the scream of the pain of torture and many more with his face contorted by the smell of death that passes through the streets of Warsaw.
Through her voice, the characters that tell the horror of the Holocaust in Poland from the story of Irena Sendler parade: Irena saying a Hail Mary in Polish; a German military man issuing orders to the prisoners of the ghetto, a resigned mother who extends her arms to deposit her son in those of Irena, who will try to save him from death, while she remains on the threshold of her house covered by the cloak of guilt and uncertainty, or the ingenious voice of the ambulance driver, who proposes to the “boss” a ruse to evade the inspection of the SS.
Sarfati moves around the stage with mastery. Coming from the collective theater, he confesses that after making the Balcón de Golda he fell in love with the one-man theater. “I fell in love with the loneliness of the stage, and with that adrenaline rush to fill it, that responsibility to fill it, to reach every heart,” he tells us.
On this occasion, Fanny offers us in The Angel of Warsaw, a dramaturgy by Tomás Urtusástegui and the direction of Carlos Rangel, the moving story of Irena Sendlerowa, the Polish nurse who saved thousands of children from the horror of the holocaust. A woman, already in her 90s, hunched over, with wobbly legs and leaning on a walker, narrates from the corner of her memories the most important lesson that life has given her: resist with joy and live with hope.
“Right now we all need a song of hope, and this is it,” says Fanny to define the play that premiered this Thursday night at the Shakespeare Forum, where it will do a short season every Thursday until December 9, to then go to Monterrey, Chile and Panama.
In the dark environment of the Nazi occupation, the war occupies everything in the ghetto (as in the pandemic), and the fear of death draws us back, confines us to our own ghetto that are the walls of our house and of our selfishness , until we realize that one day we have to go out. “We have to go out to live, to hug each other, to read poetry with friends, to kiss again.”
“The most democratic thing that has happened to us is having to lock us all in our burrows; the confinement, the absences that have been many, the human losses that everyone has had in this difficult time, all these things that are happening to us today have given a deep meaning to Irena’s story, so that this story situated in the Second World War it comes loaded with this emotion and this tragedy that humanity is experiencing and that we have not finished living yet ”, reflects the actress, who is deeply touched by history on a personal, ontological and professional level, she assures.
For Fanny Sarfati, theater is resilience. During the pandemic he lost his mother; Tomás Urtusástegui, the screenwriter and playwright of the play he is now playing; to Lorenzo González Letechipia, a director with whom he previously worked. “Because of sadness we don’t stop,” he says. “Art helps me to sublimate them and put them at the service of the work, at the service of the message.”
In a crushing scene, Irena reproaches herself that pain, loss and death hang over her family and friends without anything happening to her. “The worst part is seeing your loved ones die without anything happening to you,” reflects the actress.
How to laugh out loud when pain and death are around you, with the fateful feeling that there are so many who suffer because so much happens to them and nothing happens to you? Irena asks herself, with a voice that comes from a deep belly.
Like chocolate chips on unleavened bread, irony, sarcasm, black humor confine the staging, and it succeeds, making people laugh, not out loud, but it succeeds. It restores trust in humanity. He sings of hope. Caress the soul.
Who was Irena Sendler?
Irena Krzyzanowska (1910-2008), her birth name, was a Polish nurse and social worker; During World War II he helped and saved more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She was a candidate for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, an official distinction awarded by Yad Vashem to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Polish government bestowed upon her the highest civil distinction upon being named Lady of the Order of the White Eagle.
The Angel of Warsaw
Dramaturgy: Tomás Urtusástegui
Direction: Carlos Rangel
List: Fanny Sarfati
Where: Foro Shakespeare, Zamora 9, Condesa CDMX
Hours: Every Thursday in November until December 9 at 8:00 p.m.
General admission: $ 350. At the box office and the Shakespeare Forum page
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Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx