Ross Zentner
Marcus Truschinski (left) and Emily Glick in "The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk."
Marcus Truschinski, left, and Emily Glick in "The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk," Forward Theater, 2024.
At the end of a Jewish wedding ceremony, the couple smashes a glass. It is intended as a reminder that, even on a day of greatest joy and promise, the world still contains brokenness and sorrow.
Such a moment takes place partway through The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, a musical play mounted by Forward Theater and playing at the Overture Center-Playhouse through Feb. 11.
The love story of Marc Chagall and his wife, Bella, unfolds over about 90 minutes and against a backdrop of geopolitical upheaval. While this production, directed by Brian Cowing, beautifully captures the passion and color that emerged from this union — and fed Chagall's work — it struggles to hold, with equal weight, the moments of pain.
But how wonderfully this production portrays those heady early days of love. Marc (Marcus Truschinski) is anxious, melancholy and sweet, but allowed to achieve his genius in large part, this story suggests, because of the love and support of Bella, played with operatic fullness by Emily Glick.
Through music, provided by Brian Grimm and Sam Taylor, and rich and lovely lighting design by Greg Hofmann, the production transmutes the lilting, lifting and vibrant qualities of some of Chagall's most recognizable works onto the stage. Set designer Chris Dunham beautifully blends whimsy and gravitas. Petals and letters fall from the sky to move the story along. The backdrop is reminiscent of Chagall's stained-glass work while suitcases propped and stacked around the stage nod to the forced migration that marked so much of the modern European Jewish experience.
And the Chagalls were no exception to that experience, as they live through two world wars, the Bolshevik revolution, and a move to America that reads as exile. The audience knows from the start that the titular Vitebsk, once a mostly-Jewish town in now-Belarus, is no longer — at least, not in the way that Marc remembered and painted it. Gone are the cows and chickens and dozens of synagogues and smells of his mother's coffee brewing. By the end of the Holocaust, the city's Jews had nearly all either fled farther into the Soviet Union or been massacred at the hands of the Nazis.
These decades of global calamity mark an odd shift in the pacing of the play, which seems to want to move too quickly through the pain. It suggests that a love story is essentially told through the passion of courtship, and not how it perseveres in the face of horror and unfathomable loss.
The production better handles the small, banal challenges that arise in a marriage between two brilliant people tossed up against those circumstances. Marc and Bella are the flying lovers, yes, but she alone is the ground beneath him: the force that keeps him going, often at great personal expense, so that he can become a great man.
It's not an accident that we have heard of Marc but need a play to tell us that the woman in his paintings was named Bella, née Rosenfeld, a writer. She alone cares for their infant daughter in her first days, while Marc is too wrapped up in his work. Love cannot redeem all. On her wedding day, Bella vows to "waste her life" with her beloved. To later hear him deride her work ethic, while she has maintained his existence in the face of seismic world shifts, is painful — a sudden shard of glass.
But maybe it's impossible to truly hold onto the aches and losses of love alongside its joys and generative qualities. On opening night in Madison, at the play's moving coda, a man seated near me sighed so audibly it was as though he'd been holding his breath the entire time. It was as though the audience had been brought to a precipice, and invited to take a leap, too.
