Director's Note: The Last Cyclist

A few years ago, I was taking a cab, and my cab driver asked me if I had any good ideas to help the world. He was collecting.

I’m a writer and director, I said, so all my ideas relate to that. But I do think art can help the world.

He scoffed. If you were starving, he asked, what would you like? Food? Or a flower?

This is how I responded to the cab driver: I just directed a film of a play called The Last Cyclist, based on a comedy written during the Holocaust in a camp called Terezín. All the prisoners in Terezín, including all the actors, were starving. The play made fun of the Nazis, and though the actors were able to rehearse it, they never performed it, for fear of reprisals. Most of the members of the cast were among the six million Jews eventually murdered.

But during those rehearsals, they felt alive. And that’s why they were doing theater—to feel alive, to feel joy. Which is essentially why all artists create. Art, I believe, is a basic need, dating back to the cave drawings. I would like to think it betters humanity. But I make theater because I need to. Because when I do, I feel joy, and when I don’t, I feel empty and unfulfilled.

I did not know the inmates of Terezín, nor have I ever experienced what they experienced. What I know is the joy of creating theater. And that is what my actors know, and my designers, and my stage manager, and all the people who helped us make this film. And that joy has always been the focus of my work on Terezín.

The context gives it a poignancy of course. It’s a poignancy that I know to expect, but it still takes me by surprise. The joy becomes heroic. It does not become heroic because I or the actors choose to portray it that way. We are just doing the show as best we know how. It becomes heroic because the audience knows what the performers in Terezín themselves did not fully realize. The audience knows the horror of the world in which these artists were living—not just the subhuman conditions of Terezín, but the death camps and the gas chambers that awaited nearly all of them. Most of the actors, composers, and writers in Terezín used their art more to entertain and divert than as political resistance—though in the case of The Last Cyclist I am fairly sure that there was an element of resistance. But feeling joy and doing art is always an act of resistance. At the very least, it is resistance to misery. It is also resistance to oppression, the oppression of society or life or fate.

I know when I personally feel besieged in today’s world, theater and film give me a place to rediscover who I am and what it feels like to be human. I am grateful for it. I need it too, in a different way perhaps than those in Terezín did, but then again in a related way. Just like I don’t feel the hunger that they felt, and perhaps cannot imagine it, I can imagine hunger. It is a need, and the need they had was great.