The daughter of a Greek Holocaust survivor grapples with her connection to atrocity.
How can you engage with your own personal connection to the Holocaust in the current day?
Jane Elias grapples with this question in her play “Do This One Thing for Me”, presented at the Bedlam Theatre. Directed by Tracy Bersley, this one woman show ventures into Elias’ life as the daughter of a Greek Jewish man during the Second World War.
Her father is a man who knows what he wants for his daughter, primarily a happy life with a loving husband, but he can be at times overbearing. As Elias grows up, she finds her relationship with her father begin to gradually shift, especially as she shows more interest in the atrocities that befell her family during the Holocaust.
This is narrated by her father in long monologues that capture his personal experiences of the Holocaust, losing his own brother and seeing unspeakable horrors. Elias begins to grow more interested in finding some kind of reconnection with her ancestry and decides to take a trip to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe.
At its core, this play is about finding ways to make peace with traumas that are always kept at an arm’s length, hovering just out of reach for you to only feel a lingering sense of what is lost. Elias embodies these traumas well, but the pacing of the show suffers very often from a lethargic momentum. All in all the play could have been far shorter, succinct and thus more impactful to the audience.
“Do This One Thing for Me” is a personal story of coming to terms with the past, continuing the narrative that we should never forget about the horrors of the past lest they repeat themselves in the present.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/do-this-one-thing-for-me