Within These Walls

Theater mainstay Talia Pura takes on the cyclicality of history with new World War II stage drama, The Walls Have Ears

BY SIENA SOFIA BERGT | siena@sfreporter.com

character that runs afoul of the rules about how Stalin has set up society.”

Pura describes the play’s historical context with familiarity. She’s had plenty of time to research: Walls was originally scheduled to debut at defunct teen arts center Warehouse 21 back in 2019, before both the pandemic and the performance space’s shutdown.

“The first day of full time rehearsals for us, [costar] Brent [Black] sent me an email with an image and said, ‘this is what came up as my memory from exactly four years ago today,’” Pura recalls. “It was us on stage, doing this play as a reading.”

In the intervening years, some of the project’s original cast moved away or left the production. Others remained from the beginning—and Pura and Labinger continued to tailor the script to their performers as they waited for live theater to feel safe again.

“You start hearing that person’s voice on the page,” Pura confesses. “It’s unlike any project I’ve ever done before. I related to the story so much, and acknowledging the voice that it was already written in, it was easy to get into the mindset of the characters that [Labinger] created.” symbol for everything that’s going on in the house.”

The additional time spent with those characters has no doubt deepened Pura’s understanding of them, and the production’s delay clearly brought her artistic relationship with Labinger into new and fruitful collaborative territory. But this timing has had one other effect on the project. Now Walls’ world premiere coincides with another war being fought along Russian borders.

Given that limited setting and The Walls Have Ears’ focus on female experiences of World War II, the audience will find it easy to connect the work to the many stage adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank (or the new miniseries A Small Light about Miep Gies, who hid the Franks). But while there’s a young

Jewish girl among the many relatives sheltering in Tsurah’s house, unlike Anne Frank, the characters in Pura and Labinger’s story are not hiding from Nazis. Instead, they are threatened by security forces from the Soviet Union—then allies of the United States.

“The irony there is that Stalin’s armies are fighting the Nazis,” Pura points out. “And so part of this story is also what happens to a

“We’re leaving it completely in a historical context,” Pura notes. “We’re not drawing any parallels to the modern world. We’re not adding any little touches. You really don’t need to.”

THE WALLS HAVE EARS

7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday; 2 pm Sunday, April 28-May 7. $15-$20 Teatro Paraguas 3205 Calle Marie Ste. B, (505) 424-1601