ADAMS – The term “refusenik” is thankfully out of date – it was coined to refer to the Jewish dissidents in the former Soviet Union who sacrificed what rights and privileges they had in an effort to emigrate from behind the Iron Curtain.
The term will be revived by playwright Alison Bendix this summer in a staged reading of her 11-character play The Refuseniks at the Adams Theater. The drama sheds light on the personal and political challenges a group of dissidents faces at a crisis moment in their lives – they have committed to challenging the Soviet regime and, while they have already felt the backlash for doing so, how the Communist government might ultimately deal with them is still very much uncertain. The once-privileged characters reduced to living communally in a single apartment, and, as director Tony Simotes puts it: “There is still a belief that there is hope, that some things can be solved. Yet underlying all of it is that there is also, as with any group of people that has found oppression in life, always the fear of something yet to come.”
While The Refuseniks is set in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it’s not precisely a product of historical imagination. Bendix penned the first version of play in 1979, not long after she visited the Soviet Union to meet some of the refuseniks whose cause was being championed by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), a group founded in the United States in 1964. Connecting with refuseniks in Moscow was a dodgy and dangerous undertaking – they were spied on by the state and Bendix, if caught, could have been arrested.
She remembers that before she left, the SSSJ suggested she fill a suitcase with American goods such a denim jeans that she could give to the refuseniks she met so they could resell them on the black market to make money that might help them obtain exit visas. The SSSJ suggested she visit the main synagogue in Moscow. “They didn’t necessarily go in for services,” she says, “because they knew nothing about being Jewish – only that ‘Jewish’ was a bad thing stamped on their passports. But they did congregate there and slipped notes to each other, because they were under surveillance.” One person she met trusted her enough to invite her to “an English-speaking club” in a communal apartment, and there she met refuseniks who were “learning English, because they all wanted to go to America. They had an armoire and on the top was their baggage. They said, ‘See – our bags are packed. We are ready to go.’ One of them told me, ‘Every Jew should have a chicken in the pot and his bag packed.’ And that turned into a line in the play.”
That initial contact afforded Bendix the opportunity to meet other refuseniks and she transmitted their stories in the early drafts of the play. Part of the dramatic tension of The Refuseniks is that these characters, whose Jewishness is at the root of their travails, “have no knowledge of anything Jewish,” says Bendix. One character determines that everyone in the apartment will celebrate Purim, but that nobody knows exactly what Purim is – and what’s more, neither does the American Jewish representative of a group trying to raise money for them. These Russian Jews are then shown “trying to learn what is [this Jewishness] that is causing them all this grief and then finding joy in discovering what it is and that it’s worth fighting for.”
Reflecting on why the play has a universal message, Simotes says, “As a non-Jew, one of the things I loved about the play is that there are a lot of people everywhere who sit within their own ethnicity or religion and yet, how much do they really know? People come to a point in time that they know something's wrong and their lives are not are not stable, and they're looking for how to make things better. The play brings us to a place of large struggles that a society is going through, and yet there's this deep-seated effort trying to understand exactly who we are as people.”
Simotes, a founding member and formerly the artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, says he’s looking forward to working with a large cast of actors, among them Berkshire favorite Annette Miller. “Alison stuck to her guns about not wanting double-casting,” he says. “Today, because of the politics and pricing of theater, you have three people playing 30 roles all the time. I think there's a real strong value in today's theater being able to not see four people represent fifteen characters. Then, each actor out there represents their own energy and storyline.”
Bendix, who had a long career as a journalist and author, characterizes herself as an “accidental playwright.” She rewrote The Refuseniks over the decades before returning to it in recent years. She entered it in a competition of the Road Theatre, North Hollywood’s prestigious festival of staged readings, where it was chosen from among 600 submissions to be one of 25 plays presented in 2023.
Adds Simotes: “I'm also excited that we're forging this relationship with a new theater. [Founding Executive and Artistic Director] Yina Moore of The Adams Theater has taken on the mantle of continuing to explore new work. It’s nice to feel that we're out there in the very beginnings, again, of what's possible – especially in North County.”
The Adams Theater will present a staged reading of The Refuseniks at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, August 9 and Saturday, August 10, and at noon on Sunday, August 11. Tickets can be reserved online or by calling (888) 401.5022. The Adams Theater is located at 27 Park Street in Adams.