‘Marcel on the Train’ Considers How an Iconic Artist Was Shaped by Dark Times

Before he became an iconic artist, Marcel Marceau was a smuggler, albeit for a noble cause. In 1943, the man whose name is synonymous with mime — born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France — transported dozens of Jewish orphans from his Nazi-occupied country into Switzerland, as part of his work with a children’s relief organization.The new play “Marcel on the Train” imagines one such journey. Over 100 tense minutes, we observe as the title character, only 20 himself, tries to use his burgeoning gifts for comedy and storytelling, including but not limited to the non-verbal kind that would make him famous, to distract and comfort a posse of restless and understandably terrified 12-year-old boys and girls.“Marcel” was co-written by Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater, a musical theater star most widely known for his roles in the two-part film adaptation of “Wicked”; Mr. Pailet also directs this world premiere production, and Mr. Slater stars as Marcel, though the one-act play is essentially an ensemble piece, calling for four adult actors to play the children and periodically introducing us to other characters.Mr. Pailet and his design team immediately establish a vibe that’s both ominous and whimsical: Mr. Slater appears alone at first, miming, forming a silhouette that will be accompanied by those of the actors playing the children as they enter one by one. Studio Luna’s lighting later underscores objects and creatures that Marcel and the kids form with their fingers, to funny and eerie effect.Scott Davis’s scenic design is suitably stark, using wooden benches to simulate the passenger car carrying our hero and his charges, whose cover story is that they’re Boy Scouts enjoying a field trip. Messrs. Pailet and Slater mine the humor and the horror in this scenario; at one point, Marcel lines a bucket with clothing so that one of the girls, Berthe, who desperately has to pee, can relieve herself without being overheard.The group is inevitably discovered and, in the play’s most suspenseful scene, interrogated. Aaron Serotsky — who deftly juggles several roles, including Marcel’s father and his cousin, a member of the French Resistance who is collaborating on this mission — exudes cool menace as the Nazi who plays mind games with each one, alternately frightening and flattering the children in particular.“Train” includes segments that allow us to see the children as grownups, decades after their ordeal — though as Berthe, the most skeptical of them, makes clear in the play’s opening moments, neither they nor we are entirely certain of their survival. Describing a dream to Marcel, she says, “Everyone I know is there and they’re old. But I’m twelve still because I never got to get old.” Tedra Millan is adorable and haunting as Berthe, underlining the character’s precocious world-weariness and childlike stubbornness, both of which inform her fraught, amusing interaction with Marcel. Mr. Slater, who suggests Marceau’s physical grace and wit convincingly enough — movement consultant Lorenzo Pisoni surely deserves credit — manages a similarly appealing rapport with the other performers playing children, among them Max Gordon Moore and Alex Wyse, respectively cast as the self-righteous Adolphe and the wisecracking Henri.Maddie Corman is a standout as the sensitive Etiennette, who appears to be mute, and thus forms a special bond with the young man who would go on to dazzle the world with his silent expressivity. “Marcel on the Train” suggests that Marceau might have partly honed those skills using whatever beauty and light he could summon, trying to escape a cruelty that defies words.

‘Marcel on the Train’ Considers How an Iconic Artist Was Shaped by Dark Times

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