“Janka” to Play at Front Row

 

By Volney Dunavan, The Sierra Star

 

(Oakhurst, CA) January 16, 2004 – A play that had its first ‘cold’ reading two years ago in a loft in a home in North Fork, will come to the Front Row Theater for three performances next weekend.

 

Janka, the uplifting story of one woman’s will to survive in Nazi Germany and her desire to experience the American dream, will be presented at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, January 23 and 24, and at a matinee Sunday, January 25 at 2 p.m.

 

The play is a lifetime project of Valley Public Television’s writer/producer/director Oscar Speace, who has based it on a letter written by his mother following her liberation from Nazi concentration camps and slave-labor near Munich Germany. It is performed as a one- woman show by his wife, Janice Noga.

Since its first North Fork interpretation Janka has played in Fresno, North Fork and Los Angeles, and now, hopefully, will be going on the road on a tour that ultimately will end up in New York.

 

According to an article by Cathie Campbell in the May 28, 2003 Sierra Star (“Telling Janka’s story”), Mr. Speace found his purpose in life in 1997 when an aunt told him she had a letter his mother had written October 7, 1945, telling the story of the journey his mother and her two sisters had experienced during the Holocaust.

 

The journey began on May 15, 1944 and took them from Sighet, Romania to Auschwitz to Dachau to Munich, as Jewish slave laborers for the Nazis. Their journey would end May 1, 1945 in a railroad boxcar when the German SS guards laid down their weapons in the face of American tanks.

 

“My mother’s name was Janka Festinger” says Mr. Speace in the SIERRA STAR article. “She died in 1994. She was 77 years old. She had immigrated to America in the summer of 1946 after marrying my father, Bob Speace, a G.I. stationed in Germany.

 Their marriage was the first to be recognized by the U. S. Army.”

 

Her letter is a moving and compelling story about the horrors the Jews faced at the hands of the Nazis. It is a story Janka would never tell her twin sons who were born in 1948, although she more freely shared it with her daughter-in-law in her thick Hungarian accent. This woman is the one who arrived in the United States on July 4 and believed the flags and fireworks were just for her. This woman is the one portrayed by that daughter-in-law during the 90-minute play.

 

Especially during the three week run the play had in Hollywood away from friends and family, when no one knew if anyone would even show up, the actress imagined any empty seats being filled by those who perished in Auschwitz. During this run the play metamorphosed from two acts into one, and was cut and polished to more beautifully display its simple truth.

 

Mr. Speace is on the Emmy award winning production team for ABC-30 in Fresno. He creates, directs and produces “Valley Press” for KVPT, and has been nominated for an Emmy for his work on “Conquest of My Brother,” a PBS docu-drama that details the treaty-making and treaty-breaking of the United States government with Native Americans.

 

His wife, Janice Noga, portrays his mother. Ms. Noga has previously played leading roles in Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, Follies, I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, 87 Charing Cross Road, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune and Love Letters. She has also performed numerous concerts from New York to Los Angeles.

 

She presently teaches second grade at Easterby School in Fresno and has been a popular addition to productions of the Squirrel Cage Theatre in North Fork. A graduate of Hanford High School, she is listed in the Hanford Joint Union High School District Hall of Fame and is a Kings’ County Notable. Although Mr. Speace and Ms. Noga work in the Valley, they have their retirement home here in the hills of North Fork, as Sierra Star correspondent Jim Flanagan once wrote, to live “between acts.”

 

The play is part of a larger endeavor, The Janka Project, a Holocaust documentary being prepared for public television. The next performance of Janka after Oakhurst will be at 8 p.m. Saturday, February 7 in the Bonner Auditorium of the Fresno Art Museum.