Butterfly Kisses

Last month at this time I was busy prepping for the opening of my all-time favorite play to direct, I Never Saw Another Butterfly. This was one of the tightest rehearsal schedules I have ever had. Years ago, when I started directing, I came upon the magic number of 25 rehearsals being the optimal amount of rehearsal time. At 2 hours a rehearsal, those 50 hours seemed to yield a quality production. This time the rehearsal period got squeezed like a, what, like a Florida orange, I guess.

Another colleague was doing a play earlier this spring that needed a bit more time, so he postponed the production by two weeks. The problem for me was given the unmovable boundaries of Prom and Graduation, I couldn’t extend my production dates. And on top of that, we had to take a sabbatical due to spring break and the madness around AP tests …so in order to do the play, I simply had to move everyone a little faster. It’s a little like rushing a 9 year-old in taking the training wheels off the bicycle…I think I did the play in about 60% of the time I usually need.

But I am getting ahead of myself…in case you don’t know this play, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, let me give you an overview, and I want to see if you can tell why this play is a provocative choice for us here in the Middle East. Here are the notes I wrote for the program last month that provides some background for the play:



In the summer of 1942, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia—Terezin to the Czechs and Theresienstadt to the Germans—had settled into a deadly rhythm, fulfilling its role as a great reservoir for Jews in central Europe. These Jews came to Terezin on their way to the “Final Solution” at Auschwitz. However, Terezin became known primarily as a “children’s camp,” and a camp noted for its schooling, and its emphasis on the arts. Music and poetry thrived in such an odd place, certainly an unlikely place for a cultural celebration. In fact, strangely enough, the Germans encouraged cultural activities as the Nazis transformed Terezin into a public relations coup. Terezin earned the name of “The Paradise Ghetto,” for the Nazis created Terezin as a false front camp to deceive an all-too-believing outside world. The Nazis used the model ghetto well, wringing every potential drop of propaganda out of the place. Foreign dignitaries and the International Red Cross paraded through Terezin to view how the Germans treated these refugees, leaving with their stamp of approval for the “Paradise Ghetto.”

Many books and films about the Holocaust founder on the hugeness of its scale: individuals get caught up in, and blur into, a faceless mass of victims and victimizers. But I Never Saw Another Butterfly is the particular story of one survivor, Raya Englanderova, a young woman on the cusp of adolescence who endures the unendurable. Her family is a typical family in Prague, stunned at the news of Nazi occupation, and shocked at all the changes in their lives. The family conversation gives the Holocaust a narrative frame and also a pathos. Papa Englanderova and son Pavel are at odds, both coming from different perspectives about what resistance means, and how to deal with the enemy. Eventually Raya is separated from her family and she goes to Terezin, where she joins Irena Synkova’s classroom, a teacher who has found the will to live by nurturing her children. In I Never Saw Another Butterfly author Celeste Raspanti uses the actual poetry from children at the Terezin concentration camp and thus has found a way of imagining the Holocaust, an event that is commonly described as unimaginable.

Through this memory play, one comes away knowing the workings of the ghetto black market, the threat of typhus, the degradation of camp life, and the treasured moments of working together in the classroom. Children like Raya, Zdenka, Bedrich, Olila and Honza kept alive not only their glowing sparks of creativity, but did not shy away from making their art a weapon, a teaching device—pictures which terrify and engross the viewer, but also elevate and enlighten. Besides the opportunity to study and hear the poetry of the children, I Never Saw Another Butterfly raises large and complex questions about survival, about freedom, about suffering, and about the moral choices that people make in response to these issues. Although the Englanderova story is a somewhat fictionalized creation in itself, one is compelled to consider the terrible relation between history and the real human beings who are history’s casualties. As Celeste Raspanti writes, “this play is history as much as any play can be history, showing the best and worst of which the human heart is capable.”


Oh, doesn’t that just stir the soul?!

If you know me well, you know this play. I Never Saw Another Butterfly is the only play I have directed in all four of my schools, and it has been one I have repeated as often as I felt I could. My debut production of I Never Saw Another Butterfly was way back in 1988 at Gaston Day School. Then at Charlotte Latin School I directed the play in 1991, in a summer production in 1992, and as a farewell production in 1996. At Hackley I trotted out my warhorse in 1999 and then again in 2003. This is a play near and dear to my heart! It is a director’s dream, but also, very, very cheap to produce. All you really need is some battered stools, some rags, some endearing young actors, and, if you can swing it, a great spotlight.

Did anyone notice anything from the director’s notes that seems different?? Anyone who knows the play well? I will give you a hint…check out the lead character’s name…see it? I spelled her name Raya. That was the first time in all my productions I spelled it Raya. That isn’t a typo. When I decided to do the play here in Jordan, I thought it wise to change her name from Raja to Raya. Why, you wonder?? One of my great students here at KA is a guy named Raja (and an exceptional historian, I might add). Pronounced the same way as the character in I Never Saw Another Butterfly; spelled the same way as the character in I Never Saw Another Butterfly. I just thought it smart to let Raja stay Raja, a young man, and change the young woman character name to Raya.

I also made a leap of faith in the casting of this part. This part of Raya/Raja is a huge part with 12 monologues and the actress appearing in every scene. She carries the play, and she needs to be an instinctive, gifted actress. Over the years Kathy Grice, Liz Donlevy, Kathleen Coyle, Liz Asti, Megan Winter, Mandy Cloud, Jennie Nolon, Liz Gunnison, Sam Barnard, and Erin Steiner have essayed this role. When I decided to do the part here, I decided I would cast a non-native English speaker for the part. As a director with many non-native English speakers I wanted to send a signal that I didn’t just cast actors with American accents in lead parts. A lovely young woman named Fakher won the part, and while it took enormous effort (for example, she had some early problems with pronouncing all the words, like ‘barracks’) she performed the part with dignity and grace and humor and poise and eloquence. Fakher takes her place with the other fine actresses I have directed and became a model of hard work and commitment. And she did the part and all the monologues in a second language!

The next part that is close to my heart in I Never Saw Another Butterfly is that of the dedicated and wondrous teacher, Irena Synkova. Each of us hopes to know at least one Irena in our lives, a teacher who transforms and loves and cares for the children around her. This part must be played by someone wise and compassionate, an actress who can communicate all the despair and hope in the world just by sitting down on a battered stool. My adult friend Mary was the first of my Irenas, and now from Jordan, an exceptional young woman named Hana Mufti played the part. Irena has one of the great moments in drama when she leaves the schoolroom for the last time and offers a look like the one Mary Tyler Moore offered in her last look at the WJM newsroom at the end of her sitcom. (I still can manage a sitcom reference!!)

There is a sort-of love interest in I Never Saw Another Butterfly as well. Honza is worldly, kind of, goofy, kind of, strong, kind of, caring, kind of, and must credibly convey the promise of what young love offers. In this part I cast the young man whose own friends have dubbed him, “The Mayor of Awesomeville.” Abdullah Khalayleh is one of the most natural actors I have ever directed, and he has the intuition and awareness—dare I use the German word, gewahrsamkeit—of a pro. Abdullah is also reliability personified. At times when an actor could not seem to make it to rehearsal, Abdullah would step in and play that role at that rehearsal. Abdullah can play heartbreaking and then funny in a heartbeat.

Raya/Raja has a family scene that is gripping and dripping with subtext. The family scene is set in Prague as they await to see what the Nazis will do to their lives next. The parents cling to normalcy as they wait and see. It requires actors with skill and patience and also a tension that must explode and haunt. I gotta say Thaer and Hanna and Suhayb delivered the goods. Later in the play there is a wedding scene that is so simple, but since it takes place minutes before the families must part forever, it must have an unsentimental but raw joy to make it work. Suhayb and Giulia looked lovely as they stood there in the night air of the courtyard showing how love can conquer all.

But the heart and soul of I Never Saw Another Butterfly always will be the sections with the children. I have had as few as 8 children in a production, and as many as 45. It is a flexible amount, obviously, but in the school scenes as we see Irena help them process through the realities of their lives, and we hear the plaintive, poignant words these real children once wrote, it never fails to take my breath away.

I am not tired of this play, perhaps never will be, and this production in the deserts of Jordan in May, 2011, stands as a hallmark of my work here. I remember when at my great Khosrowshahi/Polcari going-away party in New York in 2007, dear friend Adam Kahn said he couldn’t wait until I did I Never Saw Another Butterfly in Jordan.

Tomorrow I will write about why this was not a simple decision and how the impact has been on our community.

Oh, I love suspense…come back tomorrow!

For now, savor the words that Raya/Raja says so confidently and unapologetically at the end of the play as she faces life, “not alone, and not afraid.”