By Sharon Geltner
Palm Beach Dramaworks is achieving a lot of significant firsts. It is emphasizing new plays. And it just staged (it ran Dec. 8-24) the world premiere of The Messenger, scripted by its first residential writer, Jenny Connell Davis.
The four-character, 100-minute play is about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor teaching math in Southern California who is also the messenger of man’s inhumanity to man.
Dramaworks, and other regional theaters that produce insightful and riveting new Holocaust plays, are on to something big. With organization and funding, The Messenger and other Holocaust productions could inaugurate the “vast unlearning of a generation,” some of whom apparently believe that Jews are uniquely hateful oppressors who deserve to die.
The Messenger is based on the life of Georgia Gabor, born in Budapest in 1930, who survived the Nazis and then the Russian Communists and made it her mission to teach younger generations.
While this is an important and sincere play, it is also very “talky” and takes a lot of concentration. The play is not linear.
There are four women, from four different eras, and only Gabor has a real name. The others are: “1969” (a museum curator); “1993,” (concerned mother of one of Gabor’s students); “2020” (an Asian college student during the pandemic).
The characters don’t interact nor converse. The actors take turns declaiming about recurring themes of silence and complicity, career and social ambition, timeless hatreds, the pull of history, etc. In lesser hands, The Messenger could have devolved into some kind of avant-garde, experimental theater piece that could have been tiresome or even preachy. That did not happen because of the skilled director and actors.
Gabor (Margery Lowe) relives her past in great detail (yet still sanitized.) In between, Angela Gulner as “1993” gets some of the best lines as a perplexed parent who would prefer not to get involved and not have her daughter’s psyche tormented by someone else’s problems. “What does this have to do with us?”
“2020” (Annie Fang) reluctantly comes to realize the importance of studying history, even involving other peoples, “Because that’s how we got here.” The “1969” character (Gracie Winchester) is an academic who would sell her own grandmother to keep her cushy research post, in a facility “surrounded by 100 acres of beautiful gardens.”
Producing Artistic Director William Hayes learned about Gabor from her daughter, Jupiter resident Roberta Golub. He read Gabor’s self-published autobiography and told Davis they had the makings of a play. (Golub serves as executive producer of the production.)
Turns out, Hayes and the playwright were prescient. Davis’ script is more relevant and necessary today, than when it entered production two years ago. Example: within the first two minutes of the play, a character declares the importance of “context.”
The audience gasped.
The Messenger premiered two months after Oct. 7, when Hamas militants murdered 1,200 (almost all civilian) Israelis and kidnapped babies, children and the elderly in the Simchat Torah Massacre. Hayes recently said, with skyrocketing hate crimes (especially against Jews), “I believe this is the most important play we’ve ever produced at Dramaworks.”
In 1944 Budapest, the 14-year-old Gabor was forced to watch unspeakable violence at gunpoint and then was locked into a dark tunnel with hundreds of other children. Later, she was gang-raped.
Sound familiar?
Anne Mundell’s set is pure white, perhaps suggesting the ivory tower in all its gleaming pure, corrupt glory. Kirk Bookman’s lighting and Roger Arnold’s audio guide the audience along the transitions between characters, so the play never confuses. Adam J. Thompson’s video design shows the Asian character’s artwork in live action.
After Gabor escaped the Nazis and death camps three times and suffered horrific abuse by Russian soldiers, she came to the U.S. in 1948. Beginning in 1969, she taught math for 21 years. She chose one day at the end of the semester, with permission, to share her experiences with her students.
Gabor published her autobiography in 1981. For nine years, her middle school classroom was defaced with swastikas and anti-Semitic obscenities while administrators did nothing. She quit in 1990 and died four years later of a brain tumor at age 64. (Her former students still praise her teaching skills on Amazon.)
Lowe vividly presents Gabor’s strength and endurance. Gulner is deeply believable as a concerned parent and could give Laura Dern a run for her money. (Dern played a similar role as the rich, high-powered and overprotective Monterey mom in the HBO series, Big Little Lies.)
Gulner debates between teaching children the awful truth and giving them nightmares. “It’s not the teacher’s job but I don’t want to tell them that the world is full of monsters!”
FYI: Delray Beach has its own treasure on par with Georgia Gabor. That is Fedora Horowitz, born in Bucharest, Romania. She also survived the Nazis and Soviets and self-published her autobiography, Only Yesterday: 1941-1958.
Which brings me to a modest proposal. Here in South Florida, we have a unique confluence of brilliant theatrical talent; personal knowledge of the Holocaust; Jewish nonprofits and generous donors who no longer care to build Harvard’s $50 billion endowment. What better place to organize a countywide theatrical initiative to bring multiple, modern, age-appropriate Holocaust plays such as The Messenger directly to the schools? And then take the initiative state and nationwide?
While first-person accounts from Holocaust survivors have proven extremely effective, they were limited in exposure and we’re out of time. Those mandatory student assemblies and assigned readings of Elie Wiesel’s Night often don’t take place. When they do, it’s not enough.
Theatrical performances excel because they don’t lecture. They convey history through emotion and evoke empathy in a TikTok-numbed generation. Theatrical productions are the future of viscerally teaching students that hatred of Jews (or any kind of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, creed, etc.) is wrong, un-American and will destroy us.
Perhaps the first such performance could take place at Spanish River High, where in 2018, the principal emailed a parent, “I can’t say the Holocaust is a historical, factual event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee.”
How’s that for context?