The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center sponsors Arlekin Players’ Jan. 22 performance of WITNESS, a new documentary theater experience bearing witness to the immigration stories of Jews in the face of antisemitism. A world-premiere production, WITNESS is the newest virtual theater piece from the groundbreaking Zeo Gravity Virtual Theater Lab of Arlekin Players, an award-winning, artist-driven theater company rooted in traditions of classical and contemporary Russian theater and dedicated to imaginative storytelling and new forms of theater. WITNESS was created through interviews and the use of historic materials, primarily sourced from the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The piece is inspired by the journey of the SS St. Louis, which left Hamburg in 1939 with over 900 Jewish people on board and headed to Cuba, only to be turned away, leaving the passengers stranded with nowhere to go and no escape. WITNESS shares these stories through an interactive virtual theater experience at the nexus of film, theater, and video.

The January 22 performance is co-sponsored by Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center and Action for Post-Soviet Jewry, and features a talk-back after the performance with the cast and creative team.