“Survivors” reviewed by Julia W. Rath

***** Informative and compelling, the Chicago premiere of “Survivors” could hardly have been better! Impressive directing by Elayne LeTraunik and solid performances by Rachel Fox, Nathan Kabara, Zach Kunde, Lila Rutishauser, Jacob Simon, and Shaina Summerville breathe life into this amazing one-hour presentation, featuring a very tight script written by Wendy Kout. The overriding question that this play addresses is this: How do you handle yourself when your world is falling apart and everything that you have ever known and loved is slowly being taken away from you? This includes your close connections with other people—like your family, neighbors, and loved ones—all of whom are scared about an uncertain future. It’s a story about everyday life where each individual not only loses their childhood but is forced to grow up very fast. And we quickly learn that there’s no innocence in the face of extremism and its accompanying evil.

The story is a concatenation of the personal accounts of ten Holocaust survivors, all performed by six actors, each one chameleon-like in adopting the personas of many different characters. The actors predominantly play a collage of German and Austrian Jews between the ages of 9 and 19, whose separate and individual experiences with hate and racism are merged into one timeline between 1933 and the end of World War II. We witness how these children and teens are divided from their peers and comprehensively and methodically attacked on account of being Jewish. We also see how the actors play their parents, schoolmates, teachers, rescuers, and so on with incredible theatrical power. Among other things, we see the characters’ reactions to the legitimization of violence in their native countries and what it means to become a gradually marginalized minority group. We also see when people are there for each other—such as the righteous Gentiles who could get into major trouble for harboring Jews—and likewise we see people who want to have nothing to do with the Jews and revile them.

In the course of the show, the audience witnesses how the incremental changes brought about by the Nazis in Germany and Austria became monumental as they added up on a daily basis in the context of antisemitism and growing restrictions on the freedom of expression. At one point, there is a quotation from the German poet Henrich Heine, who said in 1821: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” We are also shown a chart detailing the various groups who were targeted for extermination: They included not just the Jews but gays, transsexuals, communists, and Roma, Sinti, and those from other minority groups, and, of course, those who resisted the Nazis and their regime.

When we walk into the theatre, the audience sees a stark stage with a black background plus six empty chairs and a screen for projections on the back wall. But to tell a story like this one, there is no need for anything fancier: It is perfect for the audience to use its imagination to envision various scenes as each of the characters metaphorize from one survivor to the next: each of their accounts layered and moving forward in chronological order. As the narrative progresses and as loved ones are being sent off to concentration camps, I looked at the six chairs on stage and was reminded of the proverbial “rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.” And yet, the movement of the various actors from one scene to another, from one chair to another, is smooth and elegant, with fluid and superior choreography as they constantly shift gears, rotate throughout the stage, and change costumes in front of us so that they could play different roles. Typically, while the focus was on the main actors in a given scene, another actor behind them was changing something about their apparel, such as adding a scarf or a hat or putting on a jacket or placing a yellow Jewish star on their clothing or putting on a yarmulke (kippah). Costume design by Nick Cochran works extremely well for this history.

Whereas a good deal of the focus had to do with the actors’ interacting with each other, they would often address the audience directly and describe what was happening to them in their private lives and what was happening in Germany and Austria during this time. On three or four occasions, however, a character would make some direct comparisons between the events in Nazi Germany back then and what is taking place in America right now.

The only real flaw in this production has to do with the limitations of the venue: specifically, that the ceiling over the stage wasn’t tall enough for the projections not to be blocked by the actors. These projections largely consisted of photos of the actual Holocaust survivors and scenes of German and Austrian Jews being rounded up and deported and entering concentration camps. Since I was already familiar with images from the Holocaust, what I especially wanted to see were the recent photos of these individuals, particularly next to the photos from their youth. Despite this drawback, Sean Smyth’s projection design was quite good in its selection of important slides. Smyth also handled the sound with music taken from “Schindler’s List.”

I also felt that the online program needed more work. It lacked lots of necessary information about both the survivors and their helpers. I felt a compelling desire to live with these personal histories after the show ended and not just see names and photos flash before my eyes while watching the performance. I wanted to understand these individuals better as real people who were part and parcel of the larger scope of history. Having some of this background in writing would have assured me that their names and biographies would not be forgotten. To put this another way, it would have been helpful had a dramaturg summarized each of their lives in a paragraph or two plus add a short description about this historical era—and the fact that Germany eventually lost the war.

Though very sad, the play is inspiring with its focus on what these resilient young people did to survive all sorts of terrible hardships and atrocities. It ends with these survivors rebuilding their lives and living into old age. The production is the perfect companion to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day: this year beginning at nightfall on Wednesday, April 23rd through Thursday, April 24th, or eighty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Plus the narrative is meant to be a message for future generations. I was grateful for its cry of “Never Again!” “Never Forget!” and for its acknowledgement that six million Jews died during the Holocaust. But “Never Forget!” means that we in the audience have to remember—and to teach our children and grandchildren that what happened back then could likely happen again if we are not careful enough to prevent it.

“Survivors” played for only four performances during the third weekend of April 2025* at City Lit Theatre, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, in Chicago, located on the second floor of the Edgewater Presbyterian Church.

Tickets were $20.

For more information about this show and to see Arts Judaica’s other offerings, please go to: https://www.artsjudaica.com/.

*Note that “These four performances are a showcase for the production which hopes to tour to locations within the Chicago area…. The touring production will be especially appropriate for schools, synagogues, churches, and community groups.”