Talking with Angels - Shelley Mitchell

Budapest 1943: Four unassuming young artists searching for meaning amidst the chaos of the Holocaust, find transcendence in the face of tragedy. Their remarkable philosophical conversations with mysterious invisible forces comes to life in this luminous one-woman performance.

The drama unfolds around Gitta Mallasz's courageous attempt to save her three Jewish friends and over 100 women and children from deportation by sheltering them in a slave labor factory in the center of Budapest. As commander in charge she was successful in saving almost all of the workers.

Hanna Dallos, Gitta's childhood friend and one of the workers in the factory, was the conduit for the angels' message of personal responsibility and self-awareness. Gitta and her three friends all kept detailed diaries of the poetic and highly personal teachings they experienced over a period of seventeen months from June of 1943 until their deportation in December of 1944.

Gitta Mallasz survived the war and in 1960 smuggled the precious diaries into France. The dialogues were made public in 1976 as Dialogue avec L’Ange and immediately became a bestseller, but the the book in its original language (Az Angyal Vàlaszol) was banned by the Communist régime in Hungary until 1991.

The play is based on the original transcripts and brings the experience of Talking with Angels to the 21st century.