From sun down yesterday to sundown today, sits the observance of Yom HaShoah…Holocaust Remembrance Day.
…Separate from the January 27, UN designated “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” “Yom HaShoah” has been selected and was launched by the Jewish state itself, built three years after the end of WWII. Its purpose is to mourn, memorialize, and educate…raising political awareness and activism to prevent further genocides from happening both now and in the future.
…And with that: prayers, private observances, public groupings, readings of names, visits to memorials, and silent moments to contemplate and pay respect.
Tonight, our version in the theater will most likely be awry with havoc — light adjustments, quick changes, prop placements, cue-jumps and any number of personal frustrations that come with Tech week, four days before opening a show. But I’m giving myself a pointed requirement tonight, regardless of the circus that is bound to explode all around us.
…Tonight, I’m going to mine some little pocket through all of it, and make a specific point to be especially aware of what the lives of these people mean, who we are portraying, as 8 representatives in 6 million.
…At some point, I promise myself to really listen to the siren blares from the house speakers, consume the frustration of trying to fit and move in small, cramped quarters while sweating next to everyone else equally sandwiched in, find the humor in their eccentricities, give into the horror of their fears, and push to the front of my brain the actual extraordinary feats they daily undertook, just to stay alive.
Tonight, even though it’s mid Hell Week, I’m not going to let the technicalities of how one puts it all together on a stage for people to watch, obscure the reason WHY we are telling this story to begin with.
…With special, intimate, dedicated and personal thoughts of Auguste Rottgen van Pels : a fierce woman of great humor, style, and ball-breaking will…to push me forward.
~D
