Surviving Wor(l)ds

James Noonan is an adjunct professor of English at Carleton University
and the author of Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and
Canadian History and Literature.

Surviving Wor(l)ds was first produced by the Elysian River Theatre at
the Geordie Theatre in Montreal on February 25, 1999. The author was
born in Hungary in 1948 to survivors of the Holocaust. He has lived in
Quebec since fleeing from Hungary with his parents during the 1956
uprising against the Communist regime. Farkas has published eight
collections of poetry; Surviving Wor(l)ds is adapted from his most
recent collection, Surviving Words.

While the play is deeply autobiographical, it resonates with the more
universal theme of the opposition between order and life. The characters
are identified simply as Voice 1, 2, and 3, with Voices 1 and 2
representing a male and female Jew respectively and Voice 3 a Nazi who
tries—and ultimately fails—to destroy them. As the title of the play
suggests, it is words as much as anything else that enables Voices 1 and
2 to survive the several worlds in which they live. Farkas’s paean to
survival against all forms of tyranny is one of those plays that is more
effective in performance than on the page.