There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you (re)turn to Old Faithful and, after you dust it off, put a shine on it and kick its metaphorical tires, and (re)discover that it still rocks and gets the job done even after all these years — or, as Anna Smulowitz, the Queen of the Scene, puts it, “that we’ve still got it.” And that is what’s happening with “Terezin: Children of the Holocaust,” her award-winning — and, especially given the current international situation and ... well, life as we know it — much-too-infrequently produced play about life before death in Terezin, or what the Germans called Theresienstadt: a “showcase” concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, designed to con the world into believing the Nazis were treating Jews decently. The six kids in the play represent the 15,000 children who died at there, a fraction of the 97,000 Jews who died in this one camp, which, in turn, represents a fraction of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. Only 132 survived. But a new production, which pulls into the Actors Studio this week after a tour of local schools, is resonating in new ways, going beyond ”just” never again and tapping into new hot-button issues like homophobia and good old-fashioned bullying, “There’s been a vivid response,” says Smulowitz. “You can really feel the energy. They’re connecting the dots.”
