On Sunday, June 22, Pasadena-based theater company In Other People’s Shoes will hold a fundraising gala at Pasadena’s Throop Hall. The company focuses on productions for young people.
The event will feature a staged reading of James Still’s play And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank, first produced in 1996.
In 2020, under the leadership of Artistic Producer Mireya Hepner, the MainStreet Theatre Company’s production of the play won an LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award.
After MainStreet (located in Rancho Cucamonga) shut down during the pandemic, Hepner went on to found In Other People’s Shoes, and she is bringing together her Ovation-Award winning cast to do the reading of the play at the fundraiser. Cast members will include Catherine Black, Doug Harvey, Connor Sullivan, and Heather Taylor.
Anne Frank (1929–1945): you remember her, right, the Jewish teenager who wrote a diary while she and her family were hiding (1942–1944) in a secret annex in Amsterdam to escape Nazi persecution?
Before the Franks went into hiding, Anne hung out with her friends, including Eva Geiringer (b. 1929) and Helmuth Silberberg (1926–2015), both Jewish. These two friends survived the Shoah. Anne did not.
And Then They Came for Me focuses on the years 1938 to 1945 to dramatize Geiringer and her family’s own attempt to hide and Silberberg’s eventual escape to Belgium, where he reunited with his parents. Like the Frank family, the Geiringer family was discovered and deported to Nazi concentration camps.
The play resonates with the mission and vision of In Other People’s Shoes as stated at the company’s website: to tell “imaginative, impactful, and artistic stories,” to “champion today’s young people by encouraging empathy and open-mindedness,” and, in the process, to re-imagine “the way children and young people experience storytelling.”
As Hepner explained to me in a recent interview, In Other People’s Shoes is “still [a] very young” company. The gala will celebrate the company’s fourth anniversary. “We have very limited resources, but we pay everyone every step of the way,” Hepner noted, hence the importance of the fundraiser. In Other People’s Shoes is a 501(c)3 public charity and is qualified to receive deductible contributions.
The company has three projects in development, all youth oriented.
One has, as the working title, “The Fire Stories Project.” This project will dramatize real stories of how local young people experienced the Eaton Fire and its aftermath. The company is working with professional therapists with expertise in trauma care to develop the proper language and approach to reach out to local youth to gather their Eaton Fire stories for possible inclusion in a play.
Funds raised from the gala will support the development of “The Fire Stories Project,” along with the projects closer to being audience-ready: The Wondrous Adventures of Pia Sandia, a play written by José Cruz González and to be directed by Robert Castro, and June Carryl’s play (In)Visible Me.
The fundraiser will include refreshments, a reception, and a silent auction.
It will also include the opportunity to ponder what And Then They Came for Me discloses about Anne Frank’s time, and about our own.
Deets
- In Other People’s Shoes Fundraising Gala, Sunday, June 22, doors open at 3.15pm
- Throop Hall, 300 S. Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena
- For tickets and further details, visit the In Other People’s Shoes Web site
