Just a wild guess: Cracking jokes in front of an officer who’s sporting a swastika armband and scrutinizing the papers of four young Boy Scouts, in 1943, is a risky move. Especially since the papers are forged — the children are Jewish, half of them girls, and they are on a train trying to reach safety.
Yet the tense situation does not deter the kids’ chaperone, the 20-year-old Frenchman Marcel, played by Ethan Slater (Boq from the “Wicked” movies), from attempting small talk about his father.
“He wants me to become a baker like him, and the relationship has crumbled,” Marcel says, as he tries to mollify the officer (Aaron Serotsky). “Just baking humor,” he continues. “It’s the yeast I can do.”
He’s on a roll.
That eye-rolling, groan-worthy scene is from the new Off Broadway play “Marcel on the Train,” and because Marcel is based on a real person, and the story is inspired by true events, we understand why, instead of a comedian, he became a mime.
An internationally famous one at that: The Marcel in question is Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007 at 84 after a long career that actually brought him to Broadway twice, in 1955 and 1983 — a time span that testifies to his artistic longevity and the cultural reach of an art form he helped popularize through a clown-like stage persona known as Bip.
What is less known about the mime, who was born Marcel Mangel and was Jewish himself, is that during World War II he was active in the French Resistance and did help save Jewish children. The show that just opened at Classic Stage Company, and which Slater cowrote with the director Marshall Pailet, is the imagined retelling of a perilous journey he did make. The 12-year-old kids are played, economically and mostly unsentimentally, by the adult actors Maddie Corman, Tedra Millan, Max Gordon Moore and Alex Wyse. The superb lighting design by Studio Luna nimbly suggests a moving train one second, a shadowy Expressionist painting the next.
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