The Stroum Jewish Community Center’s Center Stage theater program has recently been revived within its halls. Now its director wants to take his next show out of the building. The gravity of the newest upcoming production, Voices of Hope, an adaptation by Center Stage director Daniel Alpern on writings from preteens and teens who lived through the Holocaust, is one that should be available to the greater community wherever they gather, he believes. So that’s where it’s going.
Private auditions are still taking place for what Alpern calls “an unusual new- form play,” in which the actors, all of whom will be kids between the ages of 8 and 18, read actual passages from such works as I Never Saw Another Butterfly and The Diary of Anne Frank.
“This material is performed by actors as if they had actually written it, performed in costumes of concentration camps,” Alpern said.
Between the readings will be creative performances set to music with small, little-known factoids about the Holocaust to be presented chronologically. One factoid, taken author Edwin Black’s 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust, explains how the company supplied the statistical equipment the Nazis used to compile the data on all the people that died at their hands.
The performance will end not at the end of the Holocaust, but nearly two decades after, at the capture and subsequent execution of Adolf Eichmann. Alpern ended the performance there because he said it shows that despite the devastation to the Jewish people, Hitler did not succeed.
“The theme is, “˜There’s hope, we survived,’” he said. Still, Alpern said, the performance brings the issue of genocide to today, and notes that it is still going on.
“This is not something that can never happen again,” he said, “it is happening right now, too.”
He titled the play Voices of Hope because hope was what got the children through those terrible years.
“How did they survive emotionally while incarcerated? They did it by writing their feelings,” Alpern said. “Their hearts removed themselves from where they were and put themselves outside the fences, emotionally. That’s just amazing to me.”
Alpern did a similar piece with Youth Theater Northwest, and found rehearsals to be emotionally draining for many of the kids acting in the play. To lighten things up, they would end each rehearsal with a few minutes of improvisational comedy so the kids could return home energized. He’ll likely do something similar with this version.
One performance is scheduled to take place at the Stroum JCC on April 11, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Beyond that, Alpern is actively seeking to take the Center Stage production to synagogues and Jewish schools between late March and into April. Ultimately, he feels this message should reach the greater community and hopes it could be taken to public schools and churches to teach them lessons that can be learned from the Holocaust.
Voices of Hope is funded by a $5,000 Small and Simple Grant provided by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Amy Wasser-Simpson, vice president of Planning and Community Services, said the Federation’s special initiatives committee funded the play because it fit the criteria of being new, creative and innovative.
“To take something and to craft it into a play that would be able to be seen by a broad community with a Jewish theme, [and] the fact that the [JCC] is trying to bring back its arts and culture program, I think the committee felt it would be a good use of its dollars,” Wasser-Simpson said.