Holocaust Play Returns to Fresno

 

By Donald Munro, The Fresno Bee

 

(Fresno, CA) February 6, 2004 – A year and a half after the Fresno debut of “Janka,” Oscar Speace is still tinkering with the play that tells his mother’s harrowmg Holocaust story. After a 12-performance run in Los Angeles, he’s trimmed the running time more than half an hour to a brisk 90 minutes. And instead of using a narrator, he’s made it a true one-woman show.

 

But the heartfelt core of “Janka” is still there — as is the presence of Speace’s wife, Janice Noga, playing her late mother- in-law. The play returns for one Fresno performance at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Fresno Art Museum.

 

“Janka” is part of a two- pronged effort by Speace and his brother, David, to document their mother’s past. They’ve shot 15 minutes so far for a feature documentary film and are planning a trip to Romania and Auschwitz.

 

“Essentially the play is a fund-raiser for the documentary,” says Speace, a Fresno TV director. “But we’re also thinking that we could offer it to Jewish organizations or temples as well.”

 

Janka Speace, described by Noga as a “colorful woman with beautiful red hair and a Hungarian accent,” never told her children the story of her personal encounter with Nazi atrocities. It wasn’t until after her death in 1994 that Speace learned of the existence of a letter she’d written to an uncle five months after she was liberated from a concentration camp.

 

In the play, Janka at age 70 asks herself the question: Would my life have been different if I had told my children my Holocaust story?

 

Speace and Noga took ‘Janka” last October to a 50-seat theater in Los Angeles. Though Speace says the three-week run lost “a little money.” it was a good learning experience. He hopes the play will continue to have a life outside of Fresno; one possibility is bringing it to Westchester State University in Pennsylvania.

He’s encouraged when he discusses the play in college settings because he feels it keeps his mother’s story alive. At a recent reading at California State University, Fresno, a woman the age of his mother said the play “made her want to know more.”