Railroad by Bryan Reynolds at the Festival di Teatro Patologico

Railroad is a stage play written and directed by Bryan Reynolds that has been touring many coutrny both in the Western and non western world. The show is primarily in English , with dialogue and songs in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish and it is a play of intense yet highly confined action (a narrow boxcar: imagine whirling atomic particles spiraling inward into a black hole) that explodes outward in the human dimensions of three living families from three cultures (Jewish, World War II German, and 21st-century American), four generations, and two eras -- all played by the same four actors. Centripetal, centrifugal, and reeling by turns, the play emerges from the defining center of the 20th century (the Holocaust, the nadir of civilized Europe) to create the wobbling imbalance of the present day on a "grassy knoll" in polyglot Battery Park, New York City. In design, acting, and production, we seek to create the pressure of confinement and the joy of childish hopes, the lack of air and the freedom of flight (emigration), the bleakness of the black German Lugar, and the audaciously bright colors of the American flag, all in their centrifugal/centripetal dance.
The plays asks what it means to be religious, have faith, belong to a nationality, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Bryan Reynolds in 2006 about Railroad:
From playwright/producer Bryan Reynolds:
The objective of the play Railroad and Transversal Theater's production is to create heightened awareness about the Holocaust and human rights at inter subjective depths rarely accomplished in representation and only accomplish able, I believe, in theater -- with actual human bodies interacting -- rather than on film or in literature. I lost a whole side of my own family to the Nazis, and have wanted to relate a story of desperation and suffering with increasing urgency with each, in my view, weak popular rendition of the Holocaust (Schindlers List, etc.), and so Railroad is a culmination of many years of heartfelt creation. When I was a graduate student at Harvard I directed two honors theses on Jewish Holocaust literature. One of my students had a breakdown and left school, and the other went on to write an excellent essay on the Maus comics. I knew I wanted to do something, tell people, show them, but didn't know how. My many encounters with anti-Semitism over the last ten years as I have traveled more and more frequently compelled me to do this. My commitment finally crystallized while Transversal Theater toured my play Woof, Daddy in Poland last April. I encountered an astonishing amount of anti-Semitism and frustrating ignorance on so many levels in both Poland and the Czech Republic that I decided absolutely to make Railroad Transversal Theater's next project (we already had another project in the works). When we toured my play Unbuckled in Romania the year before, we also encountered much anti-Semitism. One of the lead characters is Jewish, and critics kept exclaiming that Jews are not like this or that (liberal minded, polyamorous); when I pressed them at press conferences, they admitted to never having met a Jew.

Multiple cast members have been acting in the show including Italian actor Giovanni Morassutti who played both lead characters in two different production: one in Sweden in 2013 and one in Belgium in 2019.

This year the play is partecipating at the Festival Teatro Patologico directed by Dario d?Ambrosi which has established a theatre award as a tribute to Ellen Stewart who was an American director and founder of La MaMA Etc.

T�rkenstra�e 19, 13349 Berlin
Giovanni Morassutti
0049 1521 8465093

Art Aia is also News Publisher at Google News with a general interest on Arts & Culture, Sustainability and Eco- therapy.

This release was published on openPR.