Still the Night

Shannon Hengen is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

This Dora Mavor Moore Award–winning script originated in
improvisations by Theresa Tova and Liza Balkan, who also costarred in
the production’s 1996 and 1997 runs in Toronto and Calgary,
respectively. Its title comes from a song composed by Hirsch Glik, a
victim of Nazi concentration camps. The play’s 18 songs—all from the
World War II era—and an episodic storyline characteristic of
improvisational theatre describe its structure. Called a “memory
play” in which “time and place could be shifted in the blink of an
eye,” this compelling script might be further designated as Brechtian,
because of the mix of terror and humor in its dialogue.

Set in the late 1930s/early 1940s, in the 1970s, and in the present,
the play centres on two pairs of females—cousins in the earlier scenes
and mother and daughter, primarily, in the later ones. Tybele, the
daughter, has heard her mother Bryna’s war stories often and sings in
her final lines: “Mama’ll tell the stories / Mama’ll hold my head
high / Make you the heroine you always should have been.”

Bryna’s status as heroine provides the story’s dialectic, for her
actions are those of a determined survivor—strangling her cousin’s
newborn moments after delivering it, for example, to prevent the Nazis
from hearing the child’s cries and so exposing the hidden fugitives.
Also a brilliant raconteur, Bryna emphasizes how impossibly difficult
all of the war years were for her and her cousin, and how as a young
woman she learned to replace high-mindedness with brutal pragmatism.
Each of her terrible stories rivets us.

When we finally learn that her own father died for love in the war,
voluntarily following his wife to the death camps, we begin to
understand her heartlessness. She says to her cousin when they reunite
in the 1970s: “You can take your goddamn love and you can keep it.”
Her cousin, in turn, describes Bryna to her daughter as “always angry,
always hard. Funny sometimes, but always hard.” Though Bryna shapes
this play with her powerful presence, her status as heroine remains
doubtful.