• Historian Danielle Wirsansky's new play, "Sterling Legacy," explores the modern-day discovery of a Holocaust artifact.
• The play is set in the present and is based on a true story of a vintage shop finding Holocaust-era items in a storage unit.
• She is also debuting "Annexed," a musical reimagining of "The Diary of Anne Frank."

The truth can be stranger than fiction, and it can be more unsettling as well. In historian and playwright Danielle Wirsansky's latest production, "Sterling Legacy," an artifact connected to the Holocaust sends its main character on a haunting quest to uncover the object's full story and wrestle with how to handle its future.

"It's showing us, basically, how the past is still reverberating in the present," Wirsansky said.

The play, which will debut at the Palaver Tree Theater on Nov. 13, draws on Wirsansky's expertise as a Ph.D. candidate in modern European history at Florida State University. She specializes in using theater as a platform for Holocaust education and has been writing and directing plays on the topic set in the World War II era for more than a decade. This is the first time one of her productions takes place in the present.

While working on "Sterling Legacy," Wirsansky was also developing "Annexed," a musical reimagining of "The Diary of Anne Frank," that opens Nov. 20 at FSU's Conradi Theatre.

The process of developing and now staging a contemporary play brought the historical focus of her work in a new context. Writing characters who are wrestling with how their modern lives are tied back to the past was especially meaningful.

"It's certainly something I grapple with personally as a historian of the Holocaust," she said.

Up until "Sterling Legacy," Wirsansky's research and plays have been grounded in the years 1933-1945, spanning the time Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, his invasion of surrounding countries, and the ensuing state-sponsored systemic murder of 6 million Jews — as well as millions of Roma, disabled individuals, and others deemed "unfit" by the Nazi regime across Europe.

"Sterling Legacy," like her past plays, is a work of historical fiction built on deep research that shows through the exposition, the scene-setting work at the start of the play helps the audience understand the characters and the world they're inhabiting.

"I'm trying as much as I can to be authentic to the true experience of what occurred," Wirsansky said.

In addition to the contemporary timeline, the setting of "Sterling Legacy" will also feel familiar to Tallahassee residents: the play follows a fictional woman named Nora Sterling and her business partner, Jess Avery, who own a local resale business. Wirsansky envisioned their shop in Railroad Square, where she has a photography studio.

After Nora and Jess win a storage unit at an auction, they find artifacts that give them an uneasy feeling as they unbox them. They soon realize it's because the objects are from the Holocaust. The play moves forward from here, as Nora becomes increasingly haunted by the history of one object in particular and the question of what to do with it.

The plot is based on true recent events: a storage unit won by a South Florida vintage shop in an auction contained similar items, although Nora's character and the Tallahassee setting are part of the creative adaptation.

"I really wanted people to be able to see themselves," Wirsansky said. "In how. . .you can still find yourself in these situations, and that it's up to you to decide how to meaningfully and ethically handle a situation that could fall into your lap like that. These events do happen today, and it's not as wild and far out there as one would think."

Dramaturgy as education

Since 1994, Florida schools have been mandated by the state to teach Holocaust education. Wirsansky carried out a survey on FSU's campus in 2014 to see what Florida students knew about the topic, inspired by a similar project carried out in Philadelphia university campuses by Rhonda Fink-Whitman. Wirsansky asked basic questions, like how many people died and which country Hitler led. She got answers like 100,000 people and Amsterdam.

"The results were abysmal," she said. "It was very sobering for me."

That experience reinforced the importance of Holocaust education in her process as a playwright and director. She started incorporating educational components into her dramaturgy, the process of contextualizing the world of a play.

This process might be invisible to the audience, but it builds a crucial bridge between the text, actors, and people watching. In addition to running lines and rehearsing movement, the cast and crew of Wirsansky's productions get a mini Holocaust seminar so they can embody the characters with an understanding of the history they're grounded in and, in turn, convey deeper meaning to the audience.

"It's hard to teach about the Holocaust if you don't know about the Holocaust," Wirsansky said."For it to resonate with the audience, it has to resonate with the actors."

Wirsansky's process begins by asking the cast a list of questions for them to answer on paper. As they go through the correct responses, people are usually sobered by what they don't know and invested in learning, Wirsansky said.

After the initial assessment, she gets into the material by setting up a timeline starting in 1933 around the room with cards that show when laws were passed and other important events unfolded. The most important point, she said, is to show the way that Hitler and the Nazi party set up the legal framework for the atrocities that came after.

Reimagining Anne Frank story in 'Annexed'

While deep on the subject, Wirsansky also began developing "Annexed," a musical reimagining of "The Diary of Anne Frank."

The original drama production is based on the diary written by Anne Frank, a Dutch Jewish teenager who went into hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. After two years of living secretly in an annex of her father's business, the family was discovered and sent to concentration camps, where everyone but Anne's father died.

He published his daughter's diaries which went on to be one of the canonical pieces of Holocaust literature.

In Wirsansky's version, the Frank family was never taken to the concentration camp from the Amsterdam annex where they were hiding, but they were also never told that the war had ended. In the 1950s, when the play is set, they are still in the annex.

"When I think of a musical, it's when a character is so overcome with emotion that words, speaking, isn't enough," Wirsansky said. "They have to sing. Dealing with the Holocaust, with this high-emotion topic, it makes perfect sense to me that they would be singing."

While "Sterling Legacy" looks at how the past echoes into the present, "Annexed" explores the years immediately following the Holocaust. It will be performed at FSU the week following the premiere of "Sterling Legacy."

"It's been really wonderful to be able to stretch myself as well," she said, "because usually, when the Holocaust ends on paper, that's when my expertise ends. It was very gratifying for me to be able to really start looking at the post-war effects on people's lives and have a better grasp on that, because I think it's also important."

For Wirsansky, theater is one of the best ways to talk about difficult topics like the Holocaust because it creates empathy.

"To be in the room with live bodies that are suffering right in front of you, I think, is very evocative and emotional," she said.

If you go

What: "Sterling Legacy," a play by Danielle Wirsansky

Where: Palaver Tree Theater, 59 Shadeville Road, Crawfordville

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. Pay what you can night; 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14; and 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15. It runs about two hours, with intermission.

Tickets: $15; visit palavertreetheater.org

Contact: 850-933-9133 or palavertreetheater@gmail.com

What: "Annexed"

Where: Augusta B. Conradi Studio Theatre in the Williams Building at FSU

When: Nov. 20-Nov. 22; performances at 8 p.m., with matinee at 2 p.m Nov. 22

Tickets: ticketsource.com; WhiteMouseTheatreProductions@gmail.com

Ashira Morris is a guest writer for the Council on Culture & Arts. Celebrating its 40th anniversary, COCA is the capital area's umbrella agency for arts and culture (tallahasseearts.org).