Talking with Angels: Budapest 1943

Hello!

My name is Shelley Mitchell, and I’m the artistic director and creator of Talking with Angels: Budapest, 1943.   TWA is a play that follows Gitta Mallasz, who defied the horrors of the Holocaust by masquerading as a Nazi officer and sheltering Jewish workers in a forced labor factory during the occupation of Hungary in 1944.  For her brave actions, she was recognized by Yad Vashem in 2012 as Righteous Among Nations for the successful rescue of over one hundred Jewish women and children.

We are thrilled to announce that Talking with Angels: Budapest, 1943 has been invited to be part of the 2025 season at TheaterLab NYC, a premiere small venue just south of Times Square in Manhattan.  Our goal is to assemble a team of cutting edge artists to stage this powerful message of hope, faith and human dignity, with dazzling visuals and to share it with the widest possible audience. 

Since 2001, TWA has been presented over 400 times at intimate venues and festivals worldwide, including The Edinburgh Festival, St. John’s Cathedral and The Actor’s Gang, both in Los Angeles

“When we begin to study the non-physical phenomena, we will make more progress in ten years than we have in all the previous centuries of our existence.”  —Nikola Tesla

The play introduces us to an 85-year-old Gitta, who vividly recounts how she commandeered a forced labor factory to save her two Jewish friends, Hanna Dallos and Lili Strausz, from deportation and certain death. Despite the dire conditions, the three women had an inexplicable  “out of body’ experience that proved to be transformational to them, and that made them beacons of hope and resilience to the other workers. Their diaries became the book ‘Talking with Angels’, the source material for this play.

To bring this compelling story of faith and human dignity to life, we need to raise $165,000. Your generous tax-deductible donation will help make this possible. Click here to donate!

With the rise of antisemitism in recent months, we believe the legacy of this apolitical, deeply spiritual interfaith message is both epic and timely.

Thank you in advance for your consideration, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions!

"This is a long way from the Diary of Anne Frank.  …its excruciating beauty derives from its simplicity, its purity and the veracity of its harrowing stories.”  LA Weekly, Steven Leigh Morris