A Tale of One Town

A theater performance featuring a compilation of stories with no main plot line may seem conceptually dull. The fact that the only thing joining the stories together is that they took place in the same town may also seem relatively unexciting. However, when the town is a multicultural intersection with an incredibly dense past, and when the people telling the stories are teenagers from that town, what may at first sound like an uninteresting idea becomes a riveting hour of theatrical experimentation.

Coming into LaMaMA’s Annex Theater to see The Sejny Chronicles, you are met by complete darkness except for a dim light on stage. The light illuminates a clay model of pre-World War II Sejny, a town in northeastern Poland near the border with Lithuania and Belarus. In the corner of the stage, a group of 14 teenagers stands huddled together in darkness. One teenager starts singing and soon all their voices come together into a harmonious song that makes the audience silent and fills the room with anticipation for what is to come.

Before World War II, Sejny was home to a multitude of nationalities including Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Romanians, and Russians expelled from czarist Russia. All of these nationalities had different cultural traditions, and director Bozena Szroeder decided to demonstrate this in part by the use of a diversity of songs. The teenagers sing everything from Hasidic and Lithuanian songs to Catholic prayers. Szroeder, who was also responsible for working with the young performers, proves to have been an amazing vocal trainer as well as a creative director, for the songs are aurally faultless.

Throughout the course of the performance, each teenager picks up a clay building from the model and tells a story that involves the people that used to live in it. These stories have been passed down to the adolescents by their grandparents and great-grandparents. Regardless of whether the stories make you laugh or cry, each one is compelling in its own way. By telling their stories and singing their songs, the teenagers are bringing their family histories—and the history of Sejny—to life.

The performance is part of the work of the Borderland Foundation, founded by Krzysztof Czyzewski, which aims to preserve the rich culture and history of the eastern borderlands of Poland. If the performance is typical of the Borderland Foundation’s work, then it can be considered to be a great success—by having the teenagers act our their family histories, these histories are not only remembered but also shared with others.