by Natalie Mazey 03/11/2025
"The Messenger," a new play by Jenny Connell Davis, is currently featured at Six Points Theater in Saint Paul. The play's intergenerational narrative calls attention to how our past is related to our present.
Left to right: Tracey Maloney as Angela (1993), Ashley Horiuchi as Annie (2020), Laura Esping as Georgia. Photos from “The Messenger” by Sarah Whiting.
“The Messenger” connects the true story of Georgia Gabor, a Hungarian-American Jewish Holocaust survivor, to three other fictional women living in Pasadena during different time periods: a student’s mother who ignites racist incidents after fighting against Gabor’s teaching, a researcher who finds archival documents revealing World War II evil, and a young Asian student who recounts traumatic experiences in the community.
Illuminating how “history repeats and rhymes with itself,” Connell Davis weaves these stories into an interconnected narrative that recognizes the endurance of hate and the consequences of silence.
Connell Davis is Playwright in Residence and Literary Manager at Palm Beach Dramaworks. The artistic director there pitched her the story of Gabor. Connell Davis then began a deep-dive into the life of Gabor, who was a math teacher in Pasadena, California. Gabor shared wartime experiences in her classroom of escaping the Nazis three times and being the only one in her family to survive.
The current political climate sparked Connell Davis’s passion for telling this story, which she began writing in 2023. She lives in Texas and works for a theater company in Florida — two states where book bans and history education are hot-button issues. “We want this story out there because it felt like a story that people need to hear,” Connell Davis says. “It really feels like we’re living in the midst of it.”
Connell Davis explains that Gabor saw herself as a messenger.
“Georgia really thought that the reason she had been spared was because she was meant to be a messenger for these stories. Not just her own stories, but others, too.”
The play acts as a vessel for Gabor’s purpose, telling her story to new audiences at a politically fraught time.
“[Six Points Theater] feels like the right place to do this,” Connell Davis says. Now in its 30th year, the Saint Paul theater focuses on stories that reveal common threads of humanity. “The Twin Cities has strength that it draws from its diversity, even if sometimes that diversity is challenging. To have this play in a community like this is meaningful to me.”
While “The Messenger” confronts heavy topics with flawed characters that make condemnable choices, Connell Davis encourages audiences to look for hope in her play.
“I’m proud to be telling a story that helps to connect the dots between different people in different moments, showing the way that any one thing that happens is connected to other things,” Connell Davis says.
“We should be proud of things in our history that are worth being proud of, but we are going to learn more by looking at the things that we’re not proud of,” Connell Davis says. “A nation needs to examine itself if it ever wants to improve. If we don’t want to improve, what are we doing?”
The Messenger runs at Six Points Theater March 8-23.
Left to right: Tracey Maloney as Angela (1993), Ashley Horiuchi as Annie (2020), Laura Esping as Georgia. Photos from “The Messenger” by Sarah Whiting.
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