'Adapt!' at the Wilma: The courage of refugees, and of theater
How courageous immigrants are, to step off the edge of their known world, leaving behind family and friends, home and language. I marvel at my grandmother's bravery, to come to a new country with three children, speaking no English, and without the safety net of contemporary travel like cellphones and credit cards. And every day's news brings new stories of courageous immigrants, so that the relevance of Adapt!, the new play at the Wilma Theater, is even more vivid.
And how courageous for a well-known director to write a play about her own immigrant experience and to put it out there for all to see and hear. That director is, of course, Blanka Zizka, cofounder and artistic director of the Wilma, who in 1977 fled what was then Czechoslovakia to come to the United States.
Adapt! is a surreal show, collaging the past and present, the real and the imagined, music and movement, English and Czech, masks and wigs, Chopin and Cyndi Lauper into a wild fantasia. The title is the lesson, to be both learned and refused. Lenka leaves her country to escape a repressive regime she refuses to adapt to, to come to America where she has to adapt to new ways: It's cabbage to hot dogs.
The show's plot follows the young Lenka (Aneta Kernová, a Czech actor with a lovely face and a heavy accent) as she leaves her parents (Keith J. Conallen and Sarah Gliko) and little sister (Campbell Meaghan O'Hare) to become her 35-year-old self (Krista Apple), unhappily married to Pavel (Steven Rishard). Mourning her imprisoned journalist boyfriend (Jered McLenigan), who sings overlong protest songs, young Lenka is both protected and oppressed by a mysterious Old Woman (Aneza Papadopoulou, an unintelligible Greek actor), who chants tribal songs about sacred trees and "the cosmic egg" and tells Lenka to go home.
Some of the political satire is trite (pig masks, cowboy hats), and some of the musical interludes seem to stop the narrative flow rather than continue it, leaving Lenka to stare out at the audience and then give us a long speech about the meaning of freedom.
It is remarkable that there are three plays about immigrants -- all featuring women -- running concurrently in Philadelphia. Simpatico's Ironbound concerns a woman from Poland, InterAct's You for Me for You features a woman from North Korea, and Wilma's Adapt!. When Lenka finally gets to Central Park, a hot dog seller asks her where she is from. Her reply is, "It doesn't matter." And that may be what links all these plays and all the news stories together: Being an immigrant is its own special country. Maybe the real lesson is in a line from Adapt!: "Nostalgia will defeat you," since nostalgia means, literally, homesickness.
Adapt! Through April 22 at the Wilma Theatere, Broad & Spruce Streets. Tickets: $25; students $10. Information: 215-546-7824, wilmatheater.org
