SCHINDLER WASN'T THE ONLY ONE...

PR Contact: Sarah Steinberg
424 209 9822 • [email protected]

TALKING WITH ANGELS: Budapest, 1943
adapted & performed by Shelley Mitchell • originally staged by Robin Fontaine * Directed by Ryon Baxter

A life-changing true story about four young artists and their encounter with otherworldly beings.

Shelley Mitchell will be performing her adaptation of Gitta Mallasz’s French bestseller TALKING WITH ANGELS: Budapest, 1943 at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, June 3-18. Talking with Angels is the true story of Olympic athlete and Yad Vashem honoree Gitta Mallasz. She was a Holocaust rescuer and the only survivor of a group of four close-knit young artists who, despite the chaos in Nazi occupied Hungary, held weekly gatherings where they transcribed channeled messages they received from what appeared to them at the time to be angels –four distinctly different personalities— who gave council and comfort to the quartet over a period of 17 months.

…Whether you believe in angels or not, the message in

Talking with Angels is a wake-up call to anyone experiencing the inner turmoil and despair that ordinary citizens feel when their lives are suddenly taken over by corrupt leadership.

Gitta Mallasz saved their transcripts and in 1976, she published them as the French bestseller Dialogue avec L’Ange (Talking with Angels, Daimon Publishers, Switzerland). American actress Shelley Mitchell, adapted
the book into a solo show in 2001 and has performed it over 400 times, most recently at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in Scotland. This is Shelley’s first time at the Hollywood Fringe.

SCHINDLER’S LIST meets MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ

Octogenarian Gitta Mallasz, a former Olympic swimmer and graphic artist, is the protagonist of the play. During her 85 minutes on stage she recounts the supernatural events she and her friends experienced 50 years
earlier and shares the essence of what the angels said to them with the audience. She also explains how she smuggled the angel dialogues into France when she emigrated there from communist Hungary in 1960.

The book in its original language (Az Angyal Vàlaszol) was so controversial it was banned by the communist regime in Hungary until it fell in 1991. From a nomination initiated by Shelley Mitchell, in 2012, Gitta

Mallasz was posthumously awarded with Israel’s highest civilian honor as Righteous Among Nations for having rescued over 100 Jewish women and children; in collaboration with Church leaders she pretended to be the commander of a military garment factory in Budapest with Jewish prisoners as slave laborers, thus preventing their deportation to concentration camps.

TALKING WITH ANGELS: Budapest, 1943 is a shared theatrical meditation where audience meets actor for a life-changing spiritual infusion. Shelley Mitchell has performed it around the world, most notably at The Carl Jung Institutes of San Francisco and Chicago, The California Institute of Integral Studies, The Institute of Noetic Science, the New York and San Francisco Fringe Festivals and the Dutch, Irish and Edinburgh International Theatre Festivals. She performed it in Los Angeles at the Complex Hollywood in 2008. -Shelley is a graduate of New York University, The Circle in the Square Theater School and trained extensively with renowned acting coach, Lee Strasberg. She was born in Detroit, Michigan and has lived in New York City, London, Venice, Italy and San Francisco. She moved to LA in 2014 and teaches acting at the Duse Studio of Dramatic Art and is a SAG Conservatory instructor at the American Film Institute. She also consults for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and at companies like The North Face and Union Bank.

www.TalkingwithAngels.com

http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/4361?tab=details

www.DuseStudio.com

“[Talking with Angels: Budapest, 1943] is a long way from The Diary of Anne Frank…A portrayal with such leisurely, lifelike timing… Mitchell transforms into something between a dancer and a shaman. Its excruciating beauty derives from its simplicity, its purity and the veracity of its harrowing stories." Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly

In the Dorie Therare at the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd.
6/3 @3pm, 6/8 @7pm, 6/10 @8:30pm, 6/11 @2pm 6/13 @8:30pm, 6/16 @7pm, 6/18 @ 6:30pm

PR Contact: Sarah Steinberg • 424 209 9822 • [email protected] • Show #4361