The Terezin Promise

Playbook.

A Study Guide for Celeste Raspanti's "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

Collaborative Stage Directing: A Guide to Creating and Managing a Positive Theatre Environment focuses on the director's collaboration with actors and the creative team, and the importance of communication and leadership skills to create and manage a healthy working environment. Speaking directly to the student, this compact resource walks the aspiring director through basic principles of group dynamics, active listening, open-ended questioning, brainstorming, and motivational leadership, supported by examples and case studies offered by current professional and academic directors. With a focus on preparing the student director for resume-building opportunities beyond the studio lab, Collaborative Stage Directing challenges readers with reflective activities, a series of guiding questions to apply to three short plays, and an extensive checklist to assist them with independent directing projects. As an easy-to-use resource, Collaborative Stage Directing works as a supplement to a classic directing text or as a stand-alone guide.

Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.

In 1941, the fortress city of Terezin, outside Prague, was ostensibly converted into model ghetto, where Jews could temporarily reside before being sent to a more permanent settlement. In reality it was a way station to Auschwitz. When young Gonda Redlich was deported to Terezin in December of 1941, the elders selected him to be in charge of the youth welfare department. He kept a diary during his imprisonment, chronicling the fear and desperation of life in the ghetto, the attempts people made to create a cultural and social life, and the disease, death, rumors, and hopes that were part of daily existence. Before his own deportation to Auschwitz, with his wife and son, in 1944, he concealed his diary in an attic, where it remained until discovered by Czech workers in 1967.

From 1942 to 1945 over 15,000 Jewish children passed through Terezin, a stopping-off place, for hundreds of thousands on their way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Most of these perished at Auschwitz. But one child, Raja Englanderova, after the liberation, returned to Prague. This play is an imaginative creation of her story from poems, diaries, letters, journals, drawings and pictures.