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Revieww: ‘The Messenger’ delivers powerfully at Chance Theater

April 7, 2026

The nicely directed and staged drama “The Messenger,” now at Chance Theater, is a compelling, intricate showing of how social hatred, left unchecked and unaddressed, can flourish as burgeoning rot within societies.

Jenny Connell Davis’ adroitly constructed one-act play weaves together significant challenges for four women across seven decades. They grapple with high-impact experiences ranging from a Hungarian teen surviving the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust to an Asian high school student absorbing the body blows of bigotry in post-pandemic Pasadena.

This might threaten unrelieved angst weighing down a 90-minute drama, or, maybe worse, a didactic, finger-wagging life lesson lecture. But Davis’ script, supported by Chance’s supportive production, won’t have any of that.

While developing her themes leads to some unevenness among the four characters — one of these is a real-life figure, the three others are fictionalized composites — Davis is an alchemist with structure, intertwining anecdotal recounting with fluidity and almost effortless grace.

This is not the writer’s first successful involvement with Chance. A decade ago, she served as the theater’s annual Resident Playwright. In 2023, her powerful, single-actor play “Matinicus” received a memorable mounting on the Anaheim company’s intimate second stage.

Superb in directing “Matinicus,” director Katie Chidester now helms “The Messenger.” Her talent for channeling this script is the building block for thoughtful, engrossing theater.

Beyond the narrative, the production rests stalwartly on Chidester’s four actors.

There is no direct dialogue interaction between the characters, who are mostly on stage together throughout. Instead, each in turn recounts key details of their experiences, subsequent actions they undertook because of what occurred and how they felt and what they learned going ahead.

This works surprisingly well in forging on-stage chemistry. Plus, it fosters the audience’s immersion in the ties that bind — and in some instances chaff — characters with each other.

At the play’s center is a real-life figure named Georgia Gabor (with a wink in the script, “no relation to the Gabor sisters”) who survived the Holocaust and some decades on ends up as a middle school math teacher in San Marino.

Juliet Fischer plays Georgia Gabor, a Holocaust survivor who tells her middle-school math students about the traumatic events in her life, in "The Messenger," playing through April 19 at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller) — Juliet Fischer plays Georgia Gabor, a Holocaust survivor who tells her middle-school math students about the traumatic events in her life, in “The Messenger,” playing through April 19 at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller)

We hear her intense tale of avoiding the death camps — where her relatives will die — and narrowly escaping three especially harrowing situations.

Wearing a beautiful, minutely flecked brown jacket and long skirt conveying old world elegance, as well as polished formality, Gabor is inhabited with quiet but assertive steel and grace by Juliet Fischer in an assured performance.

With lightly accented English, Fischer reports — matter-of-factly; no emotionality — the deathly instances of violent religious intolerance she and other Jews were subjected to, first by the deathly Nazis and then invading Russian soldiers who trafficked after dark in child rape.

The snag is, Gabor recounts these graphic details in her 1993 classroom to her middle-school age charges, often the day before Christian religious holidays.

This baffles and outrages Angela, a protective mom who, with other parents, pushes back against Gabor using her math classroom as a forum for introducing the outside world’s worst actions.

Rofi Flynn plays Angela, a mother who objects to her daughter's middle-school math teacher telling students about the Holocaust in "The Messenger" at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller) — Rofi Flynn plays Angela, a mother who objects to her daughter’s middle-school math teacher telling students about the Holocaust in “The Messenger” at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller)

Angela is played by an actress new to Chance named Rori Flynn and Flynn’s is perhaps the show’s outstanding performance.

There is room for complexity here, since Davis’ frames Angela in a largely unsympathetic light, a symbol of those who turn a blind eye to hatred, allowing it to fester in the guise of protecting society’s status quo of the moment.

Flynn runs terrifically well with the conflicting aspects of this character. Under a steely blonde helmet of ’90-mom hair — kudos to wig meister Haven Hanson — the diminutive Flynn passionately conveys sincerely felt zeal for protecting her child. But Flynn also oozes sniveling self-righteousness while hotly defending and petitioning for childhood innocence (amusing hints emerge that the daughter is a somewhat lazy and dim underachiever).

In separate plotlines two other characters exist at different times in the unexpected environs of San Marino’s Huntington Library.

The less satisfying of these two tales is rooted in 1969. A young library researcher named Gracie chances on a lost, historic Nazi party document from 1935, an official step that set in motion the fate of European Jewry.

Megan Sigler portrays Gracie, a library researcher who uncovers a Nazi Party document, in "The Messenger," playing through April 19 at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller) — Megan Sigler portrays Gracie, a library researcher who uncovers a Nazi Party document, in “The Messenger,” playing through April 19 at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller)

Gracie’s discovery is squelched and this character’s value to the play comes in establishing how institutional silence can have an equally pernicious impact on confronting social hatreds.

It’s the one thread of the story that fails to deliver emotionally and while actress Megan Sigler is fine as Gracie, the character feels marginalized and unfulfilled as written.

Move to 2021 and again at the Huntington — “The Hunt” as employees slangily refer to it — we encounter a high school intern named Annie.

Sparking smarts and the exuberance of unsullied youth, Kallie Pong’s open and appealing Annie is a fresh-faced high achiever, full of eye rolling doubts about constant parental pressures to achieve as well as the perceived wisdom from all random adults who, her being 15, she charmingly knows in her bones to be totally clueless.

Kallie Phang plays Annie, a high school student who is targeted with hate speech by a stranger in "The Messenger," playing through April 19 at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller) — Kallie Phang plays Annie, a high school student who is targeted with hate speech by a stranger in “The Messenger,” playing through April 19 at Chance Theater in Anaheim. (Photo by Doug Catiller)

However, paired with — “of course!” — another Asian teen at the library the duo receive a terrible shock as random victims of verbalized abuse from a hate-spewing visitor on the grounds.

Pong’s eyes and demeanor cloud with doubt and the sting of impersonal hate just through words is something she grapples with as events in her journey proceed to a fatal, sad outcoming.

Beyond the performances, Chidester is backed by a subtle and impactful tech crew working muted magic.

Sound designer Hunter Moody provides delicate underscoring setting appropriate to moods as needed. Projection designer Nick Santiago also delivers with subtle touches on the backing set wall. Bruce Goodrich’s scenic design has distinct spaces for each actress to exist in, but a cohesive ambience that is supportive for the overall production.

“The Messenger” is a polemic, but it also has a strong POV from writing that successfully equips audiences with thoughtful takeaways. As such, “The Messenger” succeeds as fine theater.

‘The Messenger’

Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of four possible)

When: Through April 19. 8 p.m. Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays.

Where: Chance Theater, Cripe Stage, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim

Tickets: $48

Information: 888-455-4212; chancetheater.com

Revieww: ‘The Messenger’ delivers powerfully at Chance Theater Orange County Register

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Revieww: ‘The Messenger’ delivers powerfully at Chance Theater

‘The Messenger’

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