Being an emigrant who is fluent in three different languages helped an NIU director connect with an upcoming play.

To start this season off, the Theatre and Dance Department is putting on “The Emigrants,” a play written by Slawomir Mrozek. It will be directed by Alex Gelman.

Northern Star: What happens in the play?

Alex Gelman: Two men who are emigrants from some unnamed country to some other unnamed country are spending New Years Eve in an apartment, in a one-room apartment they share. They don’t have anywhere else to be. They don’t have anyone else — they just have each other.

NS: What changes in the play have you made, if any, since the play’s premiere?

AG: There is a natural development and growth that a live production has. I don’t think it’s going to surprise anybody to hear that it actually changes from night to night to some degree depending on how the audience is: who they are, how they respond, what they respond to. We know that in live performances, you know, it’s simple things. If there’s a laugh they won’t speak over a laugh so they can be heard; if there isn’t they’re not going to hold for it.

That’s an obvious one but there are more substantial, purely human reasons for it, because it’s always a conversation. Even the actors on stage sometimes pretend there’s no audience and the audience acts as if they’re not there either. The communication is purely between the actors and the audience. As the production had 25 or so performances already, there is a development, there is a learning curve about the play, about the audience and how it works, and great comfort with the material and with each other. So the play naturally grows but we’ve made no specific conscious changes to the play.

NS: I understand that you also work with the Organic Theater Company. What other plays has NIU put on in collaboration with the Organic Theater Company?

AG: Every year we begin our season with a remount of an Organic Theater production, but usually we have our students play the roles in what previously was done in Chicago and Naperville by professional actors. This year we are actually bringing the actors in from Chicago because it is an unusual year. We are finding ways to use alternate spaces because we are not in the Stevenson building for a couple of years while it is being renovated. We thought we would take one complication out of it for the first production. We’ve done one [Organic Theater Company play] every year for the last four years.

NS: I’m sure that the Organic Theater Company has standards as far as performance and so on. How do those standards correspond to NIU’s standards?

AG: Well, the Organic is a professional theatre company. NIU is a school. The expectation of professionalism and preparation are the same. In fact, most of the actors at the Organic Theater Company are graduates of the NIU theater program. It’s just that the purpose for doing plays is somewhat different. When we do productions at NIU our production season is our laboratory. Just like in chemistry, physics and so on there’s a lab where you practice and test that which you learn in the classroom, the same thing with our production season. We do these plays so that our students studying design or technology or acting are in a position to test what they learned in the classroom on stage. Whereas when the Organic produces plays, there we do it for the exclusive purpose of communicating with and audience and creating a body of work, so it’s just the purposes that are somewhat different, but … standards are as high as we can make them in both places.

NS: What has your experience been like in the past with putting on this play?

AG: I have been with this play off and on for over 20 years. I directed it once before about 18 years ago, and I came back to it. You know when you have the luxury of picking the plays you are going to work on, that’s not always true for all of us, you do it with great care and there’s a kind of a listening to yourself process that you go through.

You know, we all have little voices in our heads. This play, after I did it the first time I was relatively satisfied with the results. It receded as a fond memory of the past, but in the last couple of years it came back again as a project that I kept thinking about.

Things come to you, sometimes you could be walking down the street and you could remember your mother, for no reason that you could consciously discern, and maybe it happens a couple of times in one day then you pick up the phone and call mom. I think a similar thing occurs to us when we go through the process of deciding what play to do, and this one kept coming back. I can’t tell you why this play came back to haunt me, but it did. Perhaps it’s because in an earlier time I was an emigrant myself, I was born in what used to be the Soviet Union, so I have a visceral sense of what it is like to be that other person who is not like everybody else with a different language, a different background, a different set of expectations, not that, that is true anymore, but you don’t forget that. I don’t know exactly why it came back. It is what it is.

NS: Tell me more about being an emigrant and how it’s affected your career and life.

AG: I have no idea; I’ve never tried it any other way. You are who you are. I came to this country when I was 15. I don’t know that you can say that a 15-year-old is a formed human being, but an awful lot of what you end up being is in place by that point. English is chronologically my third language. I love this language, I continue to be its student and continue to be in awe of it. It’s only who I am, so it’s only that important to me.

NS: What is your main goal in putting on this play?

AG: Every production I am involved in, whether as a director or as a producer, is seeking out an opportunity to communicate with the audience, and every theatrical event at its best is about communion, is about creating that unique moment where everybody recognizes their humanity.

You know it’s like when you go to listen to a comedian, you go to a comedy club or a concert and there are those moments where you laugh at something that until that point you thought you were the only one to have thought of it. So you laugh at that, and when you do, you hear other people next to you laughing who are doing it for the exact same purpose, so at that split second there is a visceral recognition of our commonality, there’s an understanding that there is another way that most of us are the same. We need that; I think we inherently need that, I think our houses of worship provide us with that.

We have a need to keep rediscovering our humanity, and that at its best is what theatre can do, and that is my one and only purpose every time I do this work.