When Shauna Kanter’s father was dying, he sat up in bed and made an extraordinary claim: He had rescued Bertolt Brecht’s children from Nazi Germany. He said that they were alive, living in California, working as doctors. Kanter didn’t believe him. He was heavily medicated, and grand pronouncements were familiar territory. “If you were a painter and he saw you walking down the street, he would say, ‘Here comes Picasso,’” she says.
Then, a few days later, the family found his passport. It contained his photograph, a different name, and evidence of travel into and out of Germany in 1938. Her father was a Jewish Communist who would later be blacklisted. Whatever he had embellished at his bedside, the passport suggested a story she hadn’t heard.
That discovery became the seed of “Legacy,” Kanter’s play, which Voice Theatre presents November 12–21 at Bethany Hall in Kingston. Written and directed by Kanter, the production combines a daughter’s investigation of her father’s past with live klezmer music, song, and archival projections.
Kanter eventually determined that her father’s story had nothing to do with Brecht. The playwright’s children hadn’t become doctors, either. “I took what I had, the black and white, the pages of the passport, and made up this whole story,” she says. The resulting play uses a family mystery to examine the distance between political conviction and action.
In Philadelphia in 1968, Sarah tries to untangle the history of her father, David, a disillusioned former Communist. The action returns to prewar Berlin, where Anna, a Jewish woman secretly photographing evidence of the Third Reich, needs help escaping with her children. David hesitates until his wife, Vera, persuades him to undertake the rescue using a false identity. The danger culminates in an interrogation by the SS.
“Legacy” emerged while Kanter was teaching university students in London who felt politically powerless. The Berlin Wall had fallen, raising questions about Germany’s future and the history it would carry forward. The play premiered in Edinburgh in 1996. Returning to it now, Kanter finds its concerns newly urgent. “The biggest theme in the play is one person can make a difference,” she says. Through Voice Theatre’s workshops at Kingston High School, she encounters students who doubt their ability to influence public life. Kanter also sees disturbing parallels between contemporary America and Nazi Germany, pointing to book bans, restrictions on the press, and the scapegoating of immigrants.
This production includes new dialogue addressing the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. Sarah advocates for Israel to return land captured during the war, a strand Kanter has expanded in response to the current situation in Gaza. Across both periods, the characters confront questions about identity, allegiance, and what their beliefs demand of them.
Music gives those conflicts another means of expression. Kanter traces her approach to an early production with Palestinian and Israeli women: When participants couldn’t articulate their feelings in discussion, she asked them to sing without words. Their voices unlocked experiences conversation couldn’t reach. In “Legacy,” vocal work similarly explores emotions beneath the dialogue, with Klezmatics founding member Margot Leverett among the musicians.
Archival projections bring historical images into contact with bodies onstage; actors sometimes mirror or interact with the footage. The aim is to draw the past closer to the audience’s experience. Kanter hopes that proximity produces something beyond recognition: “a renewed sense of their individual power.”
This article appears in November 2026.
