About This Show
Edmund Gaynes and West End Artists Company present the off-Broadway premiere of Anulla, by Emily Mann. Pamela Hall directs Eileen De Felitta as Anulla and Neva Small as The Voice of Emily, the Interviewer.
Award-winning playwright and director Emily Mann wanted to record a relative’s personal remembrance of the Holocaust, which proved too difficult due to a language barrier. She found, however, Anulla Allen, a vibrant woman who had a rich and fascinating history of living as a Jew under the Nazi regime, yet “passing” as an Aryan. In Anulla, Mann had a learned, eloquent spokesperson with a treasure trove of stories to tell and a hunger for truth. Always doing something, scattered in many directions, her past as a Survivor informs everything she is and does.
In the course of the “interview,” we discover all that this passionate woman has seen and experienced. A Polish Jew married to an Austrian Jew, she managed to elude the authorities, and even get her husband released from Dauchau. Decades ahead of her time, she dreamt of starting the first political Women’s Party as early as 1939, and actually wrote her own six-hour play on the subject of her life. Constantly moving as a child she learned seven languages, finally settling in London as a grown woman, which she adored. The entire interview takes place in her history-packed London kitchen, as she prepares dinner for her bed-ridden sister.
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