About the Book:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

A Terrible Truth is an anthology in two separate volumes collecting plays dealing with the Holocaust. We look to the theatre to illuminate, to challenge, and to bring spiritual understanding and consolation. Theatre, at its best, embraces, enlightens, entertains, and makes us question how we live and die. The plays in this anthology share a common thread, the triumph of theatre to make us ask questions. To restore meaning and bring insight to the memory of a terrible truth.

A Terrible Truth, Volume I: Anthology of Holocaust Drama includes:

Albert Speer by the UK playwright David Edgar. A panoramic historical drama about the man whose devotion to Hitler blinded him to the worst crime of the twentieth century. Plucked from obscurity to be Hitler's architect and Minister of War, Albert Speer became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and the closest Hitler had to a friend. Having narrowly escaped hanging at Nuremberg, Speer emerged from twenty years at Spandau gaol, as he thought, a changed man. But even as he publishes his bestselling accounts of the Third Reich, the extent of his complicity in Nazi crimes returns to haunt him – and his long-suffering family. (Premiered in 2000 at the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre in London; Cast: 6 women, 20 men, or more)

Ghetto by the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol. A story of the Vilna ghetto theatre, during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. The play was inspired by an actual historical theatre which operated in the Jewish ghetto from 1941 until 1943. Despite the protests claiming "No theatre in a graveyard", the Vilna ghetto theatre responded to despair with song, satire, and – amazingly – criticism of the Nazi regime, proving that theatre can provide courage and hope even amidst atrocity.

Rose by the UK playwright Martin Sherman. Rose is a survivor. Her remarkable life began in a tiny Russian village, took her to Warsaw's ghettos and a ship called The Exodus, and finally to the boardwalks of Atlantic City, the Arizona canyons and salsa-flavoured nights in Miami beach. The play is both a sharply drawn portrait of a feisty Jewish woman and a moving reminder of some of the events that shaped the century. (Premiered in 1999 at the Royal National Theatre in London; Cast: 1 female)

Z: a meditation on oppression, desire & freedom by the British-born Canadian poet Anne Szumigalski. An astonishing first stage play by the internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet that explores the relationship between captive and captor and the terrible sacrifices human beings must make to survive.

Sammy's Follies: A Criminal Comedy by the American playwright Eugene Lion. A bar owner and his troupe carry out the trial of a concentration camp commandant for the crime of "indifference". Four drinks, one top banana, nine low comics, one ex-stripper and three lousy musicians revisit defining crimes of the twentieth century, indicting their audiences and themselves with a runaway burlesque show of satire and songs, liquor and laughter, comedy, and catastrophe. (Cast: 1 female, 9 male, 3 musicians)

About the Editor:

Irene N. Watts is a German-born Canadian writer and educator. She studied at University College Cardiff and arrived in Canada in 1968. Since 1977, she has been a resident of B.C. She is the founding director of Citadel Wheels and Wings, Alberta and Neptune Theatre Company, Nova Scotia. She served as the program director of the first International Vancouver Children's Festival. The author of 11 plays for young people, she has taught drama and creative writing in all parts of Canada.