March 13, 2025
Review by Arthur Dorman
Six Points Theater is following up January's return run of Survivors with another holocaust-themed play, Jenny Connell Davis's The Messenger. It goes without saying–at least it should–that it is of vital importance that the stories of the holocaust continue to be told. Davis's play goes beyond an account of the cruelty of those who conceived and carried out the holocaust, and the fortitude of its survivors, to talk about what happens when those stories are not as welcome. She uses the true story of Georgia Gabor, a Hungarian Jew and holocaust survivor, as her starting point. Davis also provides parallel stories that reflect on how hatred of those perceived as "different," Jewish or otherwise, stains the self-proclaimed "home of the free."
The Messenger was commissioned by Palm Beach Dramaworks, where it premiered in December 2023 under the auspices of the New Play Network Rolling World Premiere program, in which Six Points Theater along with Shrewd Productions (Austin, Texas) are participating. The play presents the real-life Gabor (Laura Esping) in 1993 at 63 years old, along with three other characters who, as far as can be told, are the playwright's invention, though parts of their stories are fact based. Each of these women narrate their own experience, as the play–eighty minutes without intermission–pivots back and forth among them.
After time in a post-war displaced person's camp, Georgia Gabor resettled in southern California, graduated with an advanced degree from UCLA, and found her niche as a middle-school math teacher in San Marino, an affluent, ambitious suburb bordering Pasadena. She has a reputation as a good but very tough teacher. Unlike other teachers who deal with typical middle-school rowdiness on the day before winter break by playing a game or having a party, for the past ten years Ms. Gabor seized that day to tell her students how she lived through the holocaust–captured three times by the Nazis, and escaped all three times–along with her gruesome treatment by Russian soldiers, her so-called liberators. We do not see dramatizations of these grim events, but Ms. Gabor's description of them are chilling enough.
Angela (Tracey Maloney) is a San Marino housewife whose daughter Lizzie is in Ms. Gabor's class. Angela tells us right off the bat that she has no prejudice, no hatred–she certainly harbors no antisemitism–but when Lizzie tells her about Ms. Gabor's stories and then has nightmares, she joins other parents to object and eventually petition for the teacher's removal. At the same time, Gabor becomes the object of antisemitic slurs and threats, which Angela finds abhorrent. Still, why does Ms. Gabor insist on talking about the holocaust? Angela's stance is, at best, conflicted. Angela may be a fictional character, but Gabor's annual holocaust narration and the petition to remove her from the classroom are true.
Gracie (Julia Isabel Diaz) is a UCLA history student on scholarship who, in 1969, is thrilled to earn an internship at the Huntington, better known as "the Hunt," a complex that includes a highly esteemed library, art museum, and botanical gardens in San Marino. Gracie is aware that her internship is a rare opportunity for her, especially as a woman of color in a milieu mainly occupied by white men. She is flabbergasted during a mundane examination of old board minutes to find a long-lost document: the original 1935 Nuremberg Law, bearing Adolf Hitler's signature. This law had the effect of rescinding German citizenship and protections from Jews, thus paving the way for the holocaust.
The document had been spirited away, against orders, by General George Patton, who wanted it as a memento of the war he helped to win. Patton, who was from San Marino, hid the document where he expected it to be safe. He died in a car accident the next year, leaving no directions regarding the hidden document. Gracie is dumbstruck by her supervisor's orders that her discovery of the Nuremberg Law be kept under wraps–suggesting that her status at the Huntington would be in jeopardy were she to reveal her find. Again, Patton's absconding of the Nuremberg document and the later revelation that it was at the Huntington is totally factual, though Gracie and her part in the story do not appear to be.
In 2020, Annie (Ashley Horiuchi) is a Chinese American college student from San Marino looking back at her junior year in high school. Her story appears to be the playwright's fabrication, though things like it have certainly occurred. Annie seems well adjusted, but scorns her classmate, another Chinese girl, who is perfect in every way and seems to have life so easy. Annie is peeved when, in a school project to engage students in community service, the two are paired together (racial profiling?) to work in the gardens at the Hunt. However, when an act of anti-Asian hatred occurs, Annie does nothing while her friend speaks up–and suffers profound consequences for doing so. Annie is haunted by her own inaction, and the heavy toll paid by her friend for taking a stand.
Director Faye M. Price embraces The Messenger's fluidity, shifting effortlessly among these four narratives. All four actors are excellent, each one completely believable in the guise of their character. Esping's Georgia exhibits the tough-as-nails persona of someone able to endure the horrors of the holocaust and its aftermath, and the quick, sharp mind of someone able to devise a way to survive again and again. She delivers her stories not with the shame of a victim, but with the pride of a victor, having been victorious against the depravity of her enemies, even at an unthinkable cost.
Diaz is convincing as a person who knows she is a minority in her field and that her future requires her to adhere to restraints counter to her moral compass. In describing Patton's writings, she is visibly shaken by the ugly fact that not everyone who fought the Nazis disagreed with their values. Horiuchi wonderfully presents the context of a high school student's world and steps toward gaining a more mature and empathetic understanding of how that context allows hate to flourish–and even to turn against her. Her regret over failing to act, even though her reticence was completely typical of a teenager–and I daresay, of most adults–invites audience members to place themselves in her shoes and take stock of their own behaviors in similar situations.
As Angela, Maloney has the challenge of playing a character who does not so easily gain our sympathy. Georgia, Gracie and Annie report on or discover heinous actions committed by others. In her narrative, Angela fans the flames of hatred, albeit in the guise of being a protective parent. Maloney plays both sides of this character credibly, expressing Angela's confidence that she has done the right thing, while revealing a variety of ways her mis-guided good intentions (if we can grant her that) set the stage for a time when any lesson that makes us uncomfortable, however factual, can be dismissed as "woke." Maloney's nuanced performance reveals the dilemma facing the Angelas of our world.
The production looks and sounds fine, with Michael Hoover's set formed out of massive stacks of banker boxes, suggesting the vastness of memories we put out of our minds and discoveries we try to conceal. James Eischen's lighting sensitively differentiates the tone from scene to scene. A Emily Heaney's costume designs, Reid Rejsa's sound design, and Rick Polenek's property design all serve the production admirably.
Davis compresses a vast amount into The Messinger's running time, and any one of these four stories could warrant a play of its own. Owing to this, there are questionable choices as to what to omit and what to include or invent. For example, we aren't told that Gabor published a memoir, "My Destiny: Survivor of the Holocaust," in 1981 and spoke on the topic outside of the school. After ten years of annually sharing her story with students, surely word of this had gotten around and wouldn't have come as a surprise to parents like Angela, who could have advised her daughter to opt out of listening to Ms. Gabor's holocaust account–an option that Gabor offered to her students.
As for the Nuremberg document, Davis has Gracie additionally finding notes written by Patton that express deeply antisemitic feelings. In fact, Patton made little effort to hide his well-known prejudices. In The Messenger, it feels that Gracie's supervisor directs her to keep all of this under wraps as if to conceal the great American hero's antisemitic bent, but Patton's flaws were not much of a secret. In 2020, Annie tells us about the hurtful impact of anti-Asian bigotry, but overlooks a step into the exacerbation of that bigotry that accompanied the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that year.
This is to say that, even with lucid dialog, excellent performances, cogent direction, and a message that becomes timelier with every breaking news story, The Messinger is a bit of a jumble. There can be no denying the importance of this play, and it certainly does have an impact, but more as a quartet of cautionary tales than the tight, coherent drama it might have been.
The Messenger runs through March 23, 2025 at Six Points Theater, Highland Park Community Center, 1978 Ford Parkway, Saint Paul MN. For tickets and information, please call 651-647-4315 or visit www.sixpointstheater.org.
Playwright: Jenny Connell Davis; Director: Faye M. Price; Scenic Designer: Michael Hoover; Costume Design: A. Emily Heaney; Lighting Design: James Eischen; Sound Design: Reid Rejsa; Properties Design: Rick Polenek; Projection Design: Tom Burgess; Technical Director: Brady Whitcomb; Stage Manager: Becca Kravchenko; Assistant Stage Manager: Samantha Fairchild.
Cast: Julia Isabel Diaz (Gracie - 1969), Laura Esping (Georgia Gabor), Ashley Horiuchi (Annie - 2020), Tracey Maloney (Angela - 1993).
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