PRESS ARTICLE

A trip through time

Geordie Theatre teaches Montreal kids some history with an ambitious production of Hana's Suitcase

Brett Hooton - The Hour
Thursday, November 22, 2007

The numbers still boggle the mind: Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Add in the Roma, gay men, disabled and others targeted by the Nazis, and it would be as if the entire population of Quebec (and a good chunk of Ontario) had been wiped away. Of those, one-and-a-half million were children.

To a young mind, the number may as well be a "jillion bazillion." So, if you're a parent or teacher, how do you talk to a child about such horrific events in any meaningful way? With Hana's Suitcase, Geordie Productions offers a valuable tool for beginning discussions about the Holocaust.

"For adults, I think the hardest thing is the fear that kids can't handle these topics," says Geordie artistic director Dean Fleming. "I think they can, and I think we have a responsibility to provide some context for that information."

Based on the award-winning book by Karen Levine, Hana's Suitcase puts a spin on the traditional Holocaust tale. A contemporary perspective, intercultural dialogue and even elements of a detective mystery make this true story both timely and timeless. Oscillating between modern-day Japan and WWII Czechoslovakia, the play pieces together the life of Hana Brady after her tattered valise arrives at Tokyo's Holocaust Education Centre via the Auschwitz Museum.

"This particular story gives a sense of individuality to figures that can be numbing," says Montreal native Emil Sher, who wrote the stage adaptation. "Because theatre's live, because of its immediacy and intimacy, children actually get to meet this young girl."

Hosting the enormous multimedia production costs approximately four times what Geordie would normally spend on a travelling production. As a result, an ambitious fundraising campaign had to be mounted.

Fleming smiles when he describes how donations have come in from an array of unlikely sources - local artists, out-of-province foundations, $100 from a couple in California. It's worth the added stress, he says, to bring Hana's Suitcase to Montreal's children, whom he calls "the most wicked audience in the world."

"If you constantly work on opening up the imaginations of children, you end up creating an amazing society of business leaders, politicians, teachers, artists, all the way across the board. That's because the most important part of human beings is just that, our imagination."

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