A play about the holocaust can sometimes be horrifying, stark or fact-filled and biographical. Distant Survivors differs greatly from these as it focuses on the drama contained in Holocaust Poetry.

Plays based on holocaust diaries like the Diary of Anne Frank can represent the practical and fearsome challenges of confinement and fear of discovery.

Author June Prager has created a dramatic text based on the poetry of American William Heyen that glows and shimmers as it gets to the emotional and philiosophical heart of the holocaust as experienced and described in his poetry.

Distant Survivors links the past to the present with power and vibrance. The play refuses to let the Holocaust be consigned to history books with little relevance to the present and reveals the hatred and ignorance that still leads to the persecution and death for many innocent people based purely on differences in religion, culture and beliefs.

It is imperative that younger generations, fully understand the depravity of the Holocaust, in order to prevent such inhumane acts from being carried out in the future.

Poems deliver a heightened and intense quality that, when transferred to spoken word on a stage, deliver an altogether different experience from realistic or biographical plays. Holocaust plays that merely describe miss the opportunity to use the most powerful and transformative art form.

Poetry makes us think.

Poetry demands our attention.

Poetic drama draws its metaphors and conducts its rhythms right into our hearts and puzzles us with seeming secret knowledge. Poetic drama resonates deep inside us with emotions and an emotional knowing.

June Prager’s Distant Survivors does all of this and more, bringing her Holocause play onto stages that will be transformed and ring with words of emotional truth.

Distant Survivors is a 50-minute play with a cast of five males and one female.

This play about the Holocaust was presented as part of a Spring 2016 Mid-Hudson Valley tour at the Parker Theatre at SUNY/New Paltz sponsored by the Resnick Institute; the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Poughkeepsie; and the Chelsea Morrison Theater in the Holbrook Arts Center at The Millbrook School co-sponsored by Congregation Beth David and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.

The play is available for touring with the Mirage Theatre Company.

Buy the script here on this website using this link. Distant Survivors.