September 1st, 2004, School Number One in the town of Beslan (in Russia) was celebrating the first day of school. It was a vivid, exhilarating, annual event, attended by parents, teachers and pupils, with much pageantry and exuberance. The crisis began when a group of armed Islamic Militants occupied the school, demanding the recognition of Chechnya’s independence. The Beslan School Siege lasted three days. It involved taking over 1,100 hostages, ending with the deaths of at least 334 people, including 186 kids.
Us/Them by Carly Wijs, is an inspired account of The Beslan Siege, enacted by two “students”, identified in the program as The Boy and The Girl. They are perhaps eight, with enthusiasm for describing their school, easily distracted, playful and eager to show up the other. Though they seem more or less friends. Piece by piece they give us the narrative. The joyful beginning of the school year, the balloons and new clothes, the beaming parents and band music. They are submerged, mostly, in getting the details right, in the same way they might tell you how an old woman and an ice cream vendor fought at the park. Next comes the appearance of soldiers, the herding and sequestering in the gymnasium, the hunger and heat and exhaustion. Even explosions and gunfire take on the same avid, yet calm tone.
The difficulty in dramatizing any catastrophic event, certainly, is doing it justice without amplification. Without unwittingly exploiting the profoundly disturbing nature of the content. In Us/Them Wijs has found a way to embrace the story, by finding narrators who don’t grasp the gravitas of their predicament. Children of that age are still learning what actions mean; their perception is somewhat cursory. They look to grownups for cues, but don’t realize their parents and teachers may be concealing panic.
When the boy and girl consider alternate scenarios to the reality (action movie or media darlings) it makes perfect sense. It also gives audience necessary detachment without soft pedaling the actual tragedy. We can process the story without the embellishment of politics or extreme emotion, comparable to Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms. Wijs has taken us to a realm fraught with atrocity and devastation, and given us the tools to experience it fully. We embrace our humanity, avoiding the natural impulse to shut down.
Wikipedia was invaluable in writing this review.
Echo Theatre and The Milford and Patricia Hammerbacher Grant presented Us/Them at The Bath House Cultural Center in September 2019.