For the last year and a half, there’s been a relative mime-like silence surrounding the Ethan Slater and Marshall Pailet co-written play “Marcel on the Train.” The play was first in workshop at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 2024, where it was revealed that the show was based upon the true history of young Marcel Marceau rescuing Jewish orphans during the Holocaust. Now, however, as the play prepares to debut Off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company, Slater, Pailet and the cast recently opened up at a press event. They talked about their characters, how the show came to be and why it’s like a spiritual bar mitzvah.
Here’s everything they shared:
Slater first came to the idea about four years ago when he learned there had been discussion in the 20th century of whether or not silent film star Charlie Chaplin was Jewish. He googled “Charlie Chaplin Jewish” — stars, they’re just like us — and discovered that he wasn’t. Yet, he also gathered that Marcel Marceau was, and that before Marceau was a famous mime, he was a member of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. This was news to Slater, who attended Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp and prides himself on knowing notable Jews.
And so, Slater called Marshall Pailet, who himself has French and Jewish ancestry. It just so happened that he did this the day after Pailet’s son was born. “I called Marshall — I’m sure he told this story — I said, Marshall, how’s Kellie? How’s the baby?” He relayed to me, with a grin. “He said, they’re great. I said, wonderful. This is not the time … But I have an idea.”
The result is “Marcel on the Train.” The show is a fictionalized account of a train ride that the young Marcel (Ethan Slater) takes in 1943. The play is a bit of a thriller, Slater told me. But it’s also filled with joy and diversion in the face of fear, thanks to moments of miming. “So the kind of legend goes, to keep [the children] quiet and comfortable, [Marcel] would do bits and those bits would become the foundation of what would become his act,” said Pailet, who also serves as the show’s director.
For Slater’s part, he has what he called “very casual” mime training. “I feel like I have a lot of the tools,” he explained. “Over the course of this development process, I worked with movement consultants and students of Marcel Marceau who worked with him directly. I just sort of glean what I can and make sure it’s embodied and true.”
“Mime is an art form that people devote their lives to,” he went on. “And so I’ve tried to devote the last four years of development to doing it justice.”
Marcel’s compatriots on the train ride are a gaggle of Jewish 12-year-olds, played by adult actors: Tedra Milan as Berthe, Maddie Corman as Etienette, Alex Wyse as Henri and Max Gordon Moore as Adolphe. Milan, who you might know as adult Nellie in “Leopoldstadt,” Fraidy in “Becoming Eve” or Dr. Walsh in season one of “The Pitt,” elucidated that Berthe is the “new girl” of the group and thinks Marcel is deeply unfunny. “She’s also a realist. She’s also really angry, for really good reasons,” she noted. Milan took over the role from Julie Benko, who portrayed Berthe in Williamstown and was originally cast in the CSC production. (Benko left to fill in for Shaina Taub as Emma Goldman in “Ragtime.”)
Etienette is in hiding in a Catholic orphanage before the train ride. “She is scared, and she has seen way too much loss for a young woman,” Corman said. “And, meeting up with Marcel opens her up to some hope and some light and some magic.” Conversely, Wyse’s Henri is the brash and bold one with some class-clown energy. He’s a dash fatalistic too, according to Wyse, but that balances out with the much-needed laughs he brings to the show.
Finally, Adolphe, an admittedly tough name for a Jewish tween, is in a hurry to grow up and be a man. But as Gordon Moore relayed, he’s not quite there yet. “He’s not a bully, but sometimes he might accidentally fall into it, and at the same time be incredibly sensitive,” He revealed. “The spirit of all the kids is that they’re in this impossible situation. They’re orphaned, they’re in the middle of a war, they’re running for their lives, and all the circumstances of the story conspire to make them want to not be kids anymore.”
Meanwhile, Actor Alex Serotsky plays all the true adult roles in the show. This includes benevolent characters like Marcel’s father, but he also portrays “The Man,” a mysterious, antagonistic character called who stops the train. For Serotsky, whose grandfather escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe and later passed down recollections of family who did not, this particular character evokes complex emotions. “In some ways, I’m trying very hard not to lean into the cliches of it, because we have seen so many of that scene in plays, in movies over the years,” Serotsky described. “The beauty of the scene is that we learn even this man who has boarded the train is complicated.”
Notably, the entire company is composed of Jewish actors. When I asked Marshall Pailet if this was intentional on his and Slater’s part, the answer was a quick yes. “We decided early on we were interested in a Jewish cast,” he offered, also pointing out that nearly the entire rehearsal room, including designers and stage managers, is Jewish. “The point of it wasn’t so we could have conversations about Jewishness or Judaism [in the rehearsal room]. That isn’t the point. But the point is that we could if we wanted to, because everyone has a stake in it.”
In my conversations with the cast, the thing that perhaps stuck with this writer the most was an assertion of Max Gordon Moore’s that “The main thrust [of the play] is that these children and this young man got on a train together and that train car, that trip, is what turned them each into the person they became.” In other words, the play is “spiritually” a bar or bat mitzvah for the characters.
When I asked Ethan what he thought of this, he became reflective. He told me he often said that at its heart, “Marcel on the Train” is about how children have the right to grow up without the fear of being hunted or killed. From there, as our interview wound down, it was hard for the conversation to not drift towards the violence tearing apart families from Israel and Palestine to Minneapolis.
“Now we are seeing soldiers, and we are seeing police separating families. Children are in the crosshairs. And it is horrifying. I grew up with the credo ‘Never again’ repeated over and over and over again,” Slater expressed somberly. “Not to take it back to the play, but in some ways this play is: What do you do in the face of powerlessness? And [the answer] is you help in the ways that you can.”
