While actors and other performers were unable to get together to put on a production during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, the method of creating a play via videoconference with actors from their individual smartphones provides a new and convenient way to record a play for educational and entertainment purposes.

Kari-Anne Innes, a Slippery Rock assistant professor of theater, recently received a $2,000 grant to produce a “video play” detailing the experiences of three girls who grew up in China during World War II.

“Three Girls of Shanghai” is the fourth video play produced by Innes and Kevin Ostoyich, a history professor at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., who is now serving a year as a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

She explained that Ostoyich’s scholarly area is Shanghai Jewish refugees, so the accomplished historian was able to collect personal testimonies from the three women, on whose experiences the video play is based.

“I am the dramaturge on this program,” Innes said, meaning she worked with a historian who wanted the video play to be written. “The personal testimonies were used to write the script.”

Innes worked on the other three video plays alongside Ostoyich when they both worked at Valparaiso University before she accepted her position at SRU.

“Three Girls of Shanghai” is now in the editing process and will be marketed for distribution at schools, synagogues, congregations and some film festivals.

“Our goal is for it to be between an hour and hour-and-a-half long,” Innes said.

Ostoyich said he chose the subject matter because few people are aware of Jews living in Shanghai during the Holocaust, or their plight.

“The refugees from Nazi Europe were not the only Jews who lived in Shanghai during the war,” Ostoyich said. “My intention was to come up with a way for people to learn about three different Jewish communities — i.e. the Sephardic community, the stateless Russian community and the refugee community.”

He said using an in-conversation format for the video play points to the similarities and differences among the communities.

“(The audience) will come to appreciate that just saying ‘the Shanghai Jews’ misses the complexity of the situation in Shanghai during the war,” Ostoyich said.

Innes and two professional actors portrayed Ester Shifren, a Sephardic Jew born in Hong Kong and raised in Shanghai; Liliane Willens, a Russian Jew born and raised in Shanghai; and Helga Silberberg, a German Jew born in Berlin whose family moved to Shanghai when she was about 5 years old.

Dawn Jeffory Nelson, a TV and film actress from Phoenix and Los Angeles, portrays Shifren, whose family had been in China for hundreds of years.

Innes plays Silberberg, and Angela Giron plays Willens.

The backgrounds at the actors’ homes as they portrayed the women on their iPhones were set up with items related to each woman’s life, Innes said.

“We tried to make them as close as possible to the women’s homes,” Innes said.

She said Shifren has taken up oil painting, so artistic works appears in her shots.

Silberberg is a retired bank manager, so Innes’ background was set up like an office.

“I tried to recreate my bookshelf to look like her bookshelf,” Innes said.

Willens collects Chinese antiques, so those items appear in Giron’s shots.

“The final product will include photos from all three women,” Innes said.

She explained the three women did not know each other when they grew up, and all three eventually emigrated to the United States.

“They each have fond memories of the U.S. coming in and liberating them,” Innes said.

One lives in Boston and two in California, said Innes.

“We are able to informally talk with these women and consult with them as we were writing the play,” she said. “They feel (the video play) is very important. They want their stories out there, especially given the current environment.”

She said all three women regularly serve as speakers and do interviews all across the U.S. on their experiences during the war.

“Now that they are getting older, they want to pass the story down to new generations,” Innes said.

Innes explained that certain themes emerged from the women’s narrative on their experiences during the war.

“And the lessons are hope, resilience and tolerance,” she said.

She said Willens was never in an interment camp because Russian Jews were not considered enemy combatants in China.

Conversely, because China was occupied by Japan and she was a German Jew, Silberberg had to live in a designated area in Shanghai.

“It was a very impoverished area,” Innes said.

The most severe treatment was endured by Shifren, because her father was of British descent.

“They were put into camps, but nothing like the camps in Europe,” Innes said. “They were kind of detained in one area.”

She said the women were strangers before the advent of the video play.

“They’ve gotten together a few times over Facebook,” Innes said.

She said she and Ostoyich are pursuing “Three Girls of Shanghai” because they like to work with interesting communities and help tell their stories.

“This is a part of the Holocaust that people don’t really understand,” Innes said.

She loves the idea of telling the stories of Jews who endured the Holocaust all over the world.

“Now, four plays into it, I’m really just committed to these stories and I hope that history doesn’t repeat itself,” Innes said.

She said the $2,000 grant she received will reimburse expenditures for some equipment and pay the actors a small stipend.

Ostoyich said he hopes students and others who view “Three Girls from Shanghai” take away not only an awareness of the multiple Jewish communities in Shanghai during the war, but the individual messages of Shifren, Willen and Silberberg.

Shifren, he said, focuses on the doors that are open to us as human beings rather than the ones that are closed. Willen talks about taking stock of one’s surroundings and working to improve oneself to transcend the negative things in those surroundings. Silberberg discusses focusing on the precious things one has, like family, and not on material possessions.

“Taken together, (their) stories show that racism appears in many forms and many places,” Ostoyich said. “The message is to try to identify racism when one encounters it, even in oneself, and choose instead to tolerate and respect those who may seem ‘different.’”

Innes said after the video play is disseminated to educational and other venues, it likely will be available to view on youtube.com.