Tags: Poland

Brothers

A play for intermediate school students, Brothers is about family dislocation and reunion due to the Holocaust. Following the Nazis takeover of Poland and intensifying attacks on Jews, a Jewish family is only able to send one of their children to safety in Palestine. The drama focuses on the child's hardships alone in this new land and his eventual reunion with his surviving younger brother.

Letters to an Alien

A teenage girl, Hannah, is sent to spend time with her grandfather in the hope that she will learn about her Jewish heritage. Her grandfather, a camp survivor, is reluctant to recount his experiences and she has no interest in learning. Aliens arrive on earth to investigate—they uncover the grandfather's painful memories and aid Hannah in better understanding her heritage by transporting her back to Poland in 1943. Only then does Hannah truly comprehend her grandfather's past.

Murmurs and Incantations

MURMURS & INCANTATIONS tells the story of a gay, Jewish New York performance artist with creative block who fatefully travels to Poland in an attempt to revive his art career, only to be confronted by the feisty ghost of his grandfather, a rabbi killed in the Holocaust. Harrowing, poignant and irreverently funny, MURMURS & INCANTATIONS explores the anguish and the responsibility of being an artist. It sharply examines the ways in which identity, cultural history and personal baggage affect, impede an artist.

Our Class

Our Class follows the lives of 10 school children—Catholic and Jewish—growing up in a small town in Poland. Beginning in 1925, the children are full of friendship and hope for the future. But when World War II breaks out, Soviets, then Nazis, invade the town and everything changes. Anti-Semitism creates a divide and leads to persecution and violence, culminating in a mass murder where the Jewish inhabitants are burned in a barn or murdered in the town square. The play questions how ordinary people, once friends, could commit such horrific acts.

The Lucky Star

The discovery of a stash of letters stamped with swastikas opens clues to an untold family history spanning multiple generations in The Lucky Star – the gripping true story of resilience and truth-tracking determination spanning Baltimore and beyond. Richard Hollander’s book Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland is brought to the stage in this mesmerizing new adaptation that restores a family’s uncharted legacy – celebrated by revelation and remembrance. Previously titled The Book of Joseph.

The Promised Land

This two act drama is derived from Bertolt Brecht's ballad The Children's Crusade, which chronicles the travels and struggles of 150 children who search for peace throughout war ravaged Poland and who all die doing so. The play opens with the execution of two elderly peasants and a young wife and husband, whose infant child has died of starvation, by Nazi soldiers; their ten-year-old daughter leaves her hiding place and finds their bodies. She is joined by a fifteen-year-old boy whose parents were also killed. And so begins the organizing and journey of the children. Throughout the play, parts of Brecht's original work are heard delivered by an unseen narrator.