Cooking up a Clash<\/p>\n
And we\u2019re off. Clashes of culture and personality seem inevitable between volatile Adam and optimistic, off-key folk-song-singing Lydia. But a bond develops that Freud\u2019s story and Eduard Tolokonnikov\u2019s staging illuminate with perspicacious sensitivity \u2013 and a good dose of humor that the cast, especially McClain, carries off beautifully (but which the mostly Slavic-language-speaking audience with which I attended didn\u2019t seem to get or appreciate much of).<\/p>\n
Beneath the Ice of the Vistula is essentially a two-hander. Brad Fryman makes brief appearances in dream sequences as several composers whom Adam idolizes. But it\u2019s Freud and McClain who must shoulder this big play with its emotionally capacious story, and they deliver the sturdiness, fire, and multidimensional charisma it needs.<\/p>\n
![\"Roman](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/BeneathVistula138_AlexandraVainshtein.jpg\")
Roman Freud, Cady McClain (Alexandra Vainshtein)<\/p>\n
Lydia is as much an artist as Adam \u2013 she in the kitchen, he in the music world. He consumes real food and drink on stage \u2013 no miming here, though I assume the \u201cvodka\u201d was water. (Indeed one of Lydia\u2019s dishes was available for sampling during intermission.) He describes her cooking in effulgent poetic language. She identifies what\u2019s missing from the music he\u2019s been composing.<\/p>\n
Appropriately, Innessa Zaretsky\u2019s cello score encapsulates both Adam\u2019s internal artistic struggle and the parallel external threat that\u2019s closing in on Poland, on its Jewish community, and on individual Jews no matter how assimilated they consider themselves.<\/p>\n
Adam is at first typical of the Jews who couldn\u2019t imagine they\u2019d be persecuted and murdered by the civilized Europeans they believed they had become. \u201cTo my colleagues, I\u2019m first and foremost a musician, a human being, and only at the very end \u2013 a Jew,\u201d Adam declares. \u201cAnd that\u2019s how it should be in the modern world.\u201d As the evil side of that world manifests, Adam grows not only more delusional but irrationally self-absorbed \u2013 ironically fueled by his and Lydia\u2019s deepening relationship. This is indeed a complex story, spun and played adroitly \u2013 and with something like the inevitable force of history.<\/p>\n