‘Kindertransport’ ... Mothers,
daughters and broken ties

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With the second show of its fall season, Festival 56 demonstrates its ability to produce intelligent, challenging-yet-accessible historical dramas. If you enjoyed the summer season’s “Laramie Project,” you will find a similar combination of sensitive performances, conceptual stage design and evocative incidental music. “Kindertransport” explores a lesser-known aspect of World War II.

On the eve of the war, nearly 10,000 Jewish children were sent out of Germany on trains bound for Holland, thence to Britain. The play introduces us to the 9-year-old Eva Schlesinger (Hannah Fiste), one of these children, and to Evelyn (Stephanie Seward), the 50-something, fully-Anglicized woman Eva becomes. Although the main action of the play centers around the historical fact of the kindertransport, the play also explores the breakdown of the mother-daughter bond in several generations, as mothers separate themselves from their daughters, nominally in order to save them, and then must suffer the outcome of that separation. For Eva and her mother, Helga (Megan Buzzard), the separation is to put Eva out of reach of the impending Holocaust. For the grown Eva and her daughter, Faith (Sarah Anderson), the rift is created by Evelyn’s choice to shield Faith from her background.

Even more poignant are the daughters’ reactions. Helga survives Auschwitz to reunite with Eva, now 17, only to hear her say, “I didn’t want to live without you, and you made me. What’s worse, you come back from the dead and punish me for surviving on my own.” Punctuating this cross-generational story is the frightening figure of the Ratcatcher (Tristan Tapscott), a children’s story that both fascinates and terrifies Eva. A version of the Pied Piper of Hamlin with a dash of Freddy Krueger, the Ratcatcher embodies all of Eva’s fears about losing her family and her identity.

Hannah Fiste is riveting as Eva, conveying both the immature uncertainty of a very young stranger in a strange land, and the hard certainty of a self-assured older teen. Even to watch Fiste at the edges of scenes is rewarding. Stephanie Seward is convincingly real in bringing the character to fruition as a middle-aged adult with both fragility and the hard certainty intact. The rest of the ensemble, Lauren Longyear as the British woman who takes in Eva, Tristan Tapscott as the frightening Ratcatcher (in several minor-character manifestations), and Megan Buzzard as Eva’s German mother Helga, is terrific and each shows a masterful range in acting — Buzzard by showing Helga before and after the incredible losses she suffers in the Holocaust; Tapscott by revealing frightening undercurrents to the jolliest of English public servants; and Longyear the ability to carry one character back and forth across 40 years.

A simple and beautiful set — basically attic walls with boxes — and dramatic lighting allow the action to seamlessly transition from the 1930s-1940s to the 1980s. Delicate, haunting music creates a fabric of longing and memory between each scene. “Kindertransport” is neither happy nor sad, or rather it’s both, in a real examination of the trade-offs that must be made in doing what is best for one’s child. All options require a sacrifice of one kind or another, either monumental or merely personal (as Helga puts it). Festival 56 examines both in this compelling production.

“Kindertransport” runs through Saturday at the Grace Theater.

For cabaret fans, Festival 56 Director Dexter Brigham has announced a one-night full cabaret on Friday, featuring the casts of all three shows of the fall season.

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