The fulcrum of the piece is a miniature model of the town made up of baked clay buildings, with an impressive church at one end and the former synagogue building at the other. As the play begins, the children gather around, gently picking up one building after another and describing the sounds that might be heard. There's the Lord's Prayer in Lithuanian and Polish, a Russian folk song, a Chassidic song. The singing throughout is marked by rich harmonies.
Various incidents are described or enacted, such as a Lithuanian wedding, the exciting arrival of gypsies, and trips across the border to buy geese, which could be sold at a profit in town. In one moving sequence, we're told how a Polish family briefly sheltered a Jewish infant from the Nazis. English translations are projected on the back of the set.
Script and direction are by Bozena Szroeder; she has guided her young performers into an appealing and responsive ensemble. The show runs just short of an hour, but it signals an enduring sense of hope for a world in which ethnic strife often seems endemic.
By Ron Cohen, Back Stage, The Actor's Rescue, April 14, 2008
The Sejny Chronicles
Sept. 30, 2011, 2:44 p.m.
Celebrating multiculturalism with affectionate curiosity, The Sejny Chronicles is a delightful and persuasive piece of theatre.
Sejny is a border town in northeast Poland inhabited through the years by Lithuanians, Poles, Russian Old Believers, Belarusians, and Jews, the Jews being deported during World War II. The play is a development of an ongoing community program there with the town's young people, under the guidance of the Borderland Foundation, an organization committed to using culture as a countermeasure to ethnic conflict. The young people have culled stories about their town's multicultural past from their parents, grandparents, and family archives, and the remembrances are melded into a lively montage of storytelling. The current company of 14 performers, teenage and younger (the youngest is 11), represents the third generation to work on the chronicles.