Just a wild guess: Cracking jokes in front of an officer who’s sporting a swastika armband and scrutinizing the papers of four young Boy Scouts, in 1943, is a risky move. Especially since the papers are forged — the children are Jewish, half of them girls, and they are on a train trying to reach safety.
Yet the tense situation does not deter the kids’ chaperone, the 20-year-old Frenchman Marcel, played by Ethan Slater (Boq from the “Wicked” movies), from attempting small talk about his father.
“He wants me to become a baker like him, and the relationship has crumbled,” Marcel says, as he tries to mollify the officer (Aaron Serotsky). “Just baking humor,” he continues. “It’s the yeast I can do.”
He’s on a roll.
That eye-rolling, groan-worthy scene is from the new Off Broadway play “Marcel on the Train,” and because Marcel is based on a real person, and the story is inspired by true events, we understand why, instead of a comedian, he became a mime.
An internationally famous one at that: The Marcel in question is Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007 at 84 after a long career that actually brought him to Broadway twice, in 1955 and 1983 — a time span that testifies to his artistic longevity and the cultural reach of an art form he helped popularize through a clown-like stage persona known as Bip.
What is less known about the mime, who was born Marcel Mangel and was Jewish himself, is that during World War II he was active in the French Resistance and did help save Jewish children. The show that just opened at Classic Stage Company, and which Slater cowrote with the director Marshall Pailet, is the imagined retelling of a perilous journey he did make. The 12-year-old kids are played, economically and mostly unsentimentally, by the adult actors Maddie Corman, Tedra Millan, Max Gordon Moore and Alex Wyse. The superb lighting design by Studio Luna nimbly suggests a moving train one second, a shadowy Expressionist painting the next.
“Marcel on the Train” kicks off with a wordless prologue mimed by Slater, a physically expressive and supple actor who starred in the title role of “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.” In his review of that show for The New York Times, Ben Brantley described him as “an uncannily bendy-bodied figure.” Here, Slater is perhaps a bit too muscular to pull off Marceau’s poetic style — he’s more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire — but at least he is more suited to the art of pantomime than the barely adequate Jesse Eisenberg, who portrayed Marceau in “Resistance” (2020), a film about the same subject.
The show pulls back somewhat from pure physical storytelling as it goes along, which is not a fortunate move because the script is nowhere near as eloquent as the silent Slater. His Marcel may be young, but at times he shows the reflexes of a wizened, dare I say hammy pro, always in need of an audience. (I was reminded of watching the persona Robin Williams projected on talk shows.)
Stories about people trying to distract children in dreadful times are very tricky — it’s hard not to think of such films as Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) or the cult fascination for Jerry Lewis’s unreleased “The Day the Clown Cried” — because they have to broker the uneasy coexistence of entertainment, pathos and sentiment. It’s a problem “Marcel on the Train” does not solve, maybe because Marcel himself is an enigma here, and his drives remain opaque.
Tellingly, the play tends to look ahead rather than back, or within: In its most interesting narrative initiative, it periodically flashes forward to the young voyagers’ futures. Of course, Marcel’s destiny becomes history, though perhaps it’s young Berthe (Millan) who knows best: “I just don’t think you’ll grow up” — an ambivalent prediction some may interpret as a compliment, others as a curse.
Marcel on the Train Through March 22 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
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