1948
January 13, Minsk. A van hits and kills Solomon Michoels: a wristwatch stopped at 10 p.m., two daughters and a wife remain of him.
Night between December 23 and 24, Moscow. Venjamin Zuskin is abducted in his sleep, interrogated, tortured and four years later shot. Moscow’s great Jewish Theater, the Goset, loses Lear and his Fool. The first and only King Lear in Yiddish will never be staged again. The instigator of these murders is Iosif Stalin. Solomon Michoels and Venjamin Zuskin:
two Jewish actors, two friends, convicted of flying too high. Guilty of having imagined an art theater of song, dance, poetry and color in the Yiddish language in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
A trip to Russia to tell a now-forgotten true story, through Chagall’s paintings and the characters of King Lear.
A show of memories to be rediscovered, kept beyond the stage.

“Put out the lights and blow the pain; the curtain closes.”

Playbill