Spotlight will dim for "Life in a Jar" cast

BY STAN FINGER

The Wichita Eagle 18 May 2003

TOPEKA - The props were already in place by the time the backstage rush hour had gathered steam.

The cast and crew of "Life in a Jar" had just traveled more than three hours from Uniontown in southeast Kansas to perform on Holocaust Remembrance Day for Temple Beth Shalom. They moved with the calm precision that comes from knowing their jobs well.

"This," history teacher Norm Conard said quietly minutes before the performance began, "is show 95."

For more than three years now, Uniontown students Sabrina Coons, Elizabeth Cambers and Megan Stewart have been performing the short play, which depicts Irena Sendler's courage in leading the rescue of 2,500 children from the Nazi-held Warsaw ghetto in Poland during World War II.

By unofficial estimates, more than 25,000 people have watched the play. It has been the subject of a documentary and earned national media attention in Poland when the cast and crew visited Sendler, now 93 and living in Warsaw.

"A Catholic woman being discovered by Protestant kids who saved Jewish children," Conard said. "If this is not a story for the ages, I don't know what is."

The shows have meant countless late nights in the middle of school weeks and cramming for tests and homework assignments on long drives home. Complaints are few, though.

"Life in a Jar" hasn't just touched the hearts of every audience that has seen it. It has changed the cast, the crew -- and even the town in which it was born.

"This is a dream," Cambers said as sunlight glancing through stained-glass windows in the temple bathed her face in light. "Oh, it's a dream."
But all dreams come to an end.

Earlier this month, Cambers and Stewart graduated from Uniontown High School. Coons, two years older, graduated from Fort Scott Community College, only a few miles from Uniontown.

As they prepared to perform recently in Topeka, the three young women seemed all too aware that a special time is coming to a close. They eagerly approached even the most menial tasks, and joked lightly about their costumes.

After nearly 100 shows, Stewart joked, the plain black shoes she wears on stage "are almost broken in."
Sitting on tiny chairs meant for small children, the trio lapsed into silence as they prepared mentally for the show.

Cambers and Stewart leaned forward, resting their chins on their knees as they stared at the floor. Coons absently reached over and massaged the back of Cambers' neck.

Catching the eye of someone who saw one of their earliest performances years before, Stewart asked: "Are we different? Have we changed?"

The answer comes from their own words.
Learning life lessons

Stewart and Cambers were just freshmen and Coons a junior when they came across a magazine article mentioning Sendler while hunting for a project to enter in the 2000 History Day competition.

Convinced that one person could not have possibly saved 2,500 children during World War II and not be widely known, the three girls and fellow freshman Gabrielle Bradbury began searching for the truth.

They learned Sendler was still alive and began trading letters with her. They wrote a play, using Irena's words and their research.

The play earned a trip to National History Day in Washington, D.C., where it won no top prizes, but caught the attention of national media. The students also flew to New York to perform for the Jewish Federation for the Righteous.

More requests to see the play soon followed. A teacher in suburban Kansas City was so moved by the students and the play that he raised money to send them and Conard to Poland to meet Sendler.

By then, family issues had forced Bradbury to leave the play. The student who replaced her also left the production. Conard now narrates portions, and the three performers have had to rework how they move around the stage.

But they don't mind. After so many shows, Stewart said, "any kind of change is great."

Working on the play has made her more assertive, Stewart said. In the early days of the project, she said, she was so shy at school that she wouldn't speak up much because "I figured I didn't have anything to say worth hearing."

Now, she said, she doesn't hesitate to step in if one student is berating another in the hallway; "See what you're doing to this person? You could be building them up instead of tearing them down."

Cambers had been abandoned hundreds of miles from home by her parents as a small child and had been a discipline problem in junior high.

Getting involved in the project and meeting Irena turned her life around, she said. She now dreams of becoming a history teacher "just like Mr. Conard."

Coons said she used to worry more about getting her lines right than what she was saying.

"Now, I think more about how to tailor the show to the audience," she said.

Jewish crowds, for example, inevitably ask what happened to the children, Coons said: Did they return to their religious roots after the war ended?

At the conclusion of the performance in Topeka, the audience of about 150 people -- many of whom gasped or wiped away tears during the show -- gave the cast and crew a standing ovation.

Among those who waited to talk to the cast was Ralph Rundquist of Assaria, who on the same date 58 years ago had been part of the American force that liberated the German concentration camp in Dachau.

Coons, Stewart and Cambers took turns listening wide-eyed as Rundquist talked of what he found in the camp.

It's the crowds Coons will miss the most.

"Every time," she said, "you learn something interesting."

She's amazed that interest in the play remains so strong, Coons said. But deep down, she knows why.

"This story gives people hope that life won't be... dark and grim," she said.

What is right?

If it hadn't been for "Life in a Jar," Stewart said, "I'd have probably been like everyone at school" in how they reacted to the war with Iraq: "Go over there and rock 'em. They're all bad."

But Irena's message is one of tolerance and acceptance of people, even if they're different than you are, she said, and that makes answers to Iraq more challenging. Sendler had to do what she did, Stewart said, because a dictator was not confronted soon enough.

"Something had to be done about Saddam," Cambers agreed. "Perhaps there was another way" besides war. "But I don't know. Maybe not."

Sendler has already made clear her feelings about the attack on Iraq in letters to the girls.

"She prays for the United States every day," Stewart said, "but she hates war."

America is wrong, the students say, if it tries to force its values and beliefs on the people of Iraq.

"They all have such enormous hearts," Conard said about the girls. "I can see the imprint of Irena on them."

"Life in a Jar" has changed Uniontown, too.

When she moved from Oklahoma City to the town of less than 300 residents several years ago, Coons said, she found the students more close-minded and critical of anyone different from themselves.

Diversity was nonexistent. Almost no one in Uniontown knew someone who was Jewish, and even now the entire school system has just one African-American student.

But in classroom discussions these days, cast and crew say, Uniontown students are more tolerant of different attitudes and lifestyles than they once were.

The show will go on
Community support for "Life in a Jar" is so strong that performances will continue even after the three founding cast members depart. The cast has been expanded with younger students, and a new "Irena" has been selected: Kathleen Meara, who will be a high school senior next year in nearby Fort Scott.

"It's definitely a legacy I have to live up to," Meara said, looking up at the set in Topeka.

Because Stewart and Cambers plan to go to college near Uniontown, they will assist with the production when they can.

Stewart will attend Pittsburg State in preparation for pharmacy school at the University of Kansas. Cambers will go to the College of the Ozarks in Missouri for a double major in history and secondary education. Coons will pursue a degree in elementary education at Kansas State University.

They will all continue their roles on a summer tour that includes stops in Detroit, New York, Connecticut and West Virginia. But then it will be time to hand over the reins.

The play will be rewritten and expanded to a half-hour, using the 3,000 pages of interviews and notes that fill two filing cabinets at the school.

It's exciting to see the play go on, Stewart said.

"If it was based on our acting, it would probably end with us," she said. "But it's the story."