November 15 & 16

I Never Saw Another Butterfly & The Terezin Promise

THE PROMISE

We are doing a serious historical play about an issue that is relevant today:  anti-semitism. With middle school students. We are exploring the Jewish roots of our Christian faith, and our solidarity with Jewish people who are at risk of prejudice and mistreatment. The first play is a documentary of sorts, including original poetry, journal entries, and artwork made by children from the Terezin Concentration Camp in the Czech Republic. The second play reads more like historical fiction, imagining the role that youth may have played in not only surviving Terezin but retaining the historical record of what they did there by rescuing the bundles of their own art and writings. Heroism abounds - at a very young age! 

THE POTENTIAL

These are hopeful plays about very difficult matters. Death is all around, and yet the children in these stories demonstrate incredible courage and resilience. By remembering their story, we are becoming like these children of history, venturing into our own fears and potential losses. We are attempting to match their courage with our own. The role of art and art-making is central to the Terezin story, and it is central to what we have been doing in the rehearsal process, including music-making, dancing, drawing, and painting. We are truly walking in their shoes while also walking in our own. This is a worthy undertaking for the soul and for the mind. Our tender and informative interaction with a Holocaust survivor, Janet Applefield, may be a once in a lifetime experience for many of our students. A major aspect of her story is the way that Roman Catholic Christians took her into their home and preserved her life.

THE PROBLEMS

The events of these plays are very far from our own personal experience. This makes it challenging to fully relate to the stakes of the characters being portrayed. The acting challenges are a stretch for our cast, some of whom are performing on the stage for the first time in their lives. More importantly, how do we tell these stories without becoming overwhelmed by the horror and loss? How do we cling to hope in Christ in the face of such evil done in the name of Christ? We have talked. We have prayed. We have made art.

THE CONTENT CONCERNS

The very serious content concerns of this evening of theatre are described in the director letter below.  I’ve also described the measures we have taken to ensure that our students are spiritually grounded, emotionally safe, and fully supported. One of the reasons we are doing an audience talkback is to check in on student learning and well-being, and also to allow audience members to process their own personal responses to this horrific part of human history. We encourage parents to discuss these matters in age-appropriate ways with their students.

FINAL COMMENTS

We invite our audiences to participate in our journey of learning about theatre, about life on earth, and about God. This rationale is one effort to spotlight student learning and to make that learning visible to all. Every audience member comes to a theatrical experience with their own expectations, their own tastes and preferences, and their own needs. Not all plays and productions will be to the liking of all audience members, and we grant every audience member the freedom to have their own response to our work. 

We’re grateful you chose to spend your time with us as our audience. We hope we made a connection with you, and have honored God in doing so.

Letter from the director

When I was a teenager, I saw my peers perform a play called I Never Saw Another Butterfly, by Celeste Raspanti, based on actual journal entries, poems, and artwork from the Holocaust. I never forgot this experience because it was the first time I truly understood what the Holocaust meant emotionally and spiritually. I could feel the horror and the sadness in the context of a live interpersonal experience. I could feel the hope of humanity in the face of human evil. I could talk with friends about it in a way that was personal and not academic.

Here is a description of the play:

Raspanti has extracted a beautiful and moving one-act play based on the poetry created in a concentration camp by the Jewish children of Prague. Over 15,000 Jewish children passed through Terezin, and only about 100 were alive when Terezin was liberated at the end of the war. One of the survivors, Raja, having lived through it all at Terezin tells the true story of the children, and their teacher, Irena, who helped to give them hope when there was little enough reason to hope, by creating a little world of laughter, of flowers and butterflies behind the barbed wire.

I have had this script on my bookshelf for my entire teaching career. I’ve wondered when I might return to it. I am grateful for the opportunity to share it with you tonight through these innocent and open-hearted children.

Why Now?

A rise of anti-semitism has been viscerally felt by our Jewish friends and family members in recent years. This has gained attention in the news media around the war in Gaza, but it’s also increasingly been a subject of professional theatre productions over the past few years. In October, I brought 30 upper school theatre students to see one such play, Leopoldstadt, by Tom Stoppard (Tony Award, Best Play 2023). Stoppard is Czech by birth, and this play is inspired by the story of his own family, many of whom perished in Auschwitz, a history which he himself didn’t learn about until he was in his 50’s. 

We chose The Sound of Music for this year’s spring musical for many wonderful self-evident reasons, but it also created an opportunity. We could tell the Terezin story and the Von Trapp family story in the same school year. This gives our students a more thorough understanding of this history both from the Jewish perspective and from the perspective of those who risked their lives to stand against the Nazis. By producing the plays in this sequence, we begin the year with the more difficult aspects of this history, and we end with a decidedly inspiring and faith-infused story of triumph to help us in our own lives to stand against anti-semitism and other forms of hate. You may remember that Mother Abbess memorably quotes Psalm 121 at the end of that show: “For Ye shall go forth with joy and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.”

Why middle school students?

I have thought long and hard about this. The age range of the children in Theresienstadt, as it is referred to in the original language, was mostly from 10-15 years of age, with some younger and some older. This play can be acted by adults or by high school students, but my instinct was that middle school students would be its most powerful mouthpiece. Over the years, I have worked with middle school students to tell remarkably complex stories, such as Little Women, The Tempest, The Book of Daniel, and last year’s The SeussOdyssey. Again and again, I witness the capacity of this age to handle themselves, each other, and the responsibilities of public storytelling with unexpected poise and maturity. By being agents of the storytelling rather than simply audience members watching their high school peers tell it, our middle schoolers have the opportunity to grow in their own self-respect and resilience. And I’m confident that as an audience, we will find this play more moving and more truthful when we see it acted out by those who still bear the physical stature of children.

We teach about the Holocaust at LCA

Our most focused work in the middle school around the Holocaust takes place in the 8th grade. By allowing our 6th and 7th graders to participate in this production, I was aware that this was a first educational experience for many of them. It is for this reason that Megan Kindt and I made the rehearsal process one that is both educational and arts-based. We drew, we painted, we sang. We explored the history.  We didn’t want cast members to feel that coming to play rehearsal was going to be depressing or anxiety-provoking. We wanted them to approach this subject matter with seriousness and maturity, and we also wanted them to make friends, to find joy, and to have fun. 

Raspanti wrote another play, a sequel entitled, The Terezin Promise. Here’s a brief description:

The liberation of Terezin concentration camp is at hand, and the Nazis are in retreat, desperate to destroy the evidence of their crimes. While some prisoners escape in the confusion of the retreat, Raja Englanderova remains to keep a promise she made to their teacher Irena: she will not leave without the drawings and poems of the Terezin children. She convinces her friends… that they must find the buried bundles and hidden suitcases before the Nazis destroy the camp. 

This second play is a dramatization of the pivotal role that children may have played not only in making art, but in preserving the historical record. Raja and her friends are portrayed as courageous heroes and role models, not just victims. They encounter a dying Nazi youth soldier, and they choose mercy over revenge.

To research the full context of how and why Theresienstadt came into existence, I returned this summer to the National Holocaust Museum in DC, where our 8th graders go every year. As I took pictures of the Theresienstadt display, I imagined what our 8th graders might feel when they are there next April, and the following April, and the following April. They will turn to each other and say, we know about that place and those pictures. Not only do we know it, but we told that story. 

Blessings,

Christopher Greco, Theatre Director and Arts Division Head

P.S.  Below see an article by a cast member about a special guest we received early on in our rehearsal process.

FROM THE BLUE AND WHITE
Janet Applefield Enlightens LCA With Her Story, by Madeline Andrade ‘31

On September 30, 2024, 89 year old Janet Applefield came to LCA to talk about her experience during the Holocaust to Middle School play cast and parents.

Born Gustawa Singer in Krakow, Poland, Applefield was only four years old when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939. She and her family were taken from their home. Some of them were taken to ghettos, which were poor urgan areas where few people lived. Others were shot and killed on site. Over 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Only 11% survived. Applefield and her father were part of that 11%.

Applefield survived because she didn’t look Jewish. She had blond hair, light complexion, and blue eyes, while the Jews in her area had darker hair, darker complexion, and brown eyes. Another reason why she survived was because both her family and those who could take her in kep her away from the Nazis and the Polish police.

Janet Applefield truly is an outstanding person. Not only is she one in 245,000 from the Holocaust to have lived, but she’s talking about it, letting other people know about her experience. At 89, there’s no stopping her now.

Play Selection Rationale at Lexington Christian Academy

At LCA, play selection is an extension of the theatre program’s curricular goals. Contrary to prevailing cultural biases, we don’t view theatre as escapist entertainment. Performance is more than showing off and showcasing talent for a profit or for likes. Of course, worthwhile theatre will be entertaining and will galvanize the talents of the production team, including those behind the scenes. (And theatre-making costs money, and hence the admission charge - so positive reviews matter!) However, the essential goal of educational theatre is to learn about the process of “of the moment” communication, human connection, and community-building through theatre-making. Stories told theatrically are immediate and interpersonally dynamic, whether they are new stories or old stories. Theatre happens in real time among a group of people. Stories are at the heart of how humans break out of loneliness and disconnection. We tell stories about life on earth at different times in history. We tell stories about our capacity to access God’s grace, and to make meaning and forge hope - especially in the face of suffering and evil. Many stories are cautionary tales about things we’d hope never to do or to experience in real life. Theatre can make us more capable of deep human connection if we let it.

For more than 30 years, LCA has produced classic plays from different time periods, adaptations of literature, and original student-devised and student-written work. Over multiple years, plays are chosen based on a variety of dynamic factors, including their representation of theatre and human history, types of stories told and different modes of telling, our casting constraints, and a combination of timeless universality and timely locality. We produce plays that speak to the widest possible audience, while also featuring the unique mix of talents represented by our current student body. There is a cyclical nature to our play choices so that over the span of a student’s time here, from 4 to 7 years, each student will have the opportunity to see a diverse range of what’s possible in theatrical storytelling. All art-making is a dialogue between the present and what has been created before us, and LCA students are being equipped to participate boldly and courageously in this dialogue, now and in the future. It’s not a coincidence that Shakespeare and student-written work may be produced in the same school year. This teaches students to take their own ideas and voice seriously. We attempt to approach professional standards from within our humble context because some students go on to become professional performing artists and technicians. 

Every play and each production has its particular promise, potential, and problems. It’s an experiment that we haven’t done before. We gather data and reflect upon our results. Our deadline is opening night, and we make our discoveries in front of others. At times, we exceed our expectations about what we can do, and at other times, we become acutely aware of our limitations. We can’t and won’t produce many plays from the canon of theatre history because of content and language concerns related to the age of our performers, and because of our limited capacity. Much of the theatre canon presents worldviews at odds with Judeo-Christian ethics. We are not afraid to encounter this body of work as persons of faith. We practice empathy and incarnation after the example of Christ. We will always push ourselves to reach beyond what we’ve done, to attempt new and ambitious things without excessive fear, and to engage with important issues and human dilemmas with humility and discretion. A young actor’s conscience will be developed and respected.