Irena's Vow, which opened last night at the Walter Kerr Theatre, follows the incredible true story of Irena Gut, a Polish-Catholic woman who successfully hid 13 Jews from the Nazis during World War II. Tovah Feldshuh (who received one of her four Tony nominations for her performance in the one woman show, Golda's Balcony), plays an older Irena addressing a classroom of students. Through her narration, she not only becomes Irena at age 17, but plays many of the other characters in the play as well.

Following the show, Irena Gut's real life daughter graced the stage to answer questions from the audience. It was an intimate and insightful addition to the play, which will only be available to audiences through the spring. Tovah Feldshuh took a moment to speak to us about the incredible life of Irena Gut, the strong women she has played throughout her impressive career, and the multiple cell phones and hearing aids that disrupt theatrical performances every day.

How did Irena's story turn into a play? Irena told her story to Dan Gordon and then he penned her story based on 16 hours of interviews that she did with him, and an 18-year friendship. Dan Gordon did meld some of her memories in order to craft a great play, and also left out half of her activities − she was very active in the underground as well − but the play would have been completely unwieldy and un-producible. So he emphasized her most extraordinary achievement, which was the saving of these 13 lives for over two years in the basement of the highest ranking German officer of Trinoble, in the Ukraine. It's like hiding someone in Dwight David Eisenhower's home.

Following the play, Irena's daughter told us a magnificent story about what happened to the officer, and how he eventually came to live with three of the Jews Irena had saved. What you don't know is that the officer was nominated for Yad Vashem (which honors non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust) and Irena put a stop to it. She said, "He saved these Jews, but at a price, and the price was my maidenhead." And that's the truth. The tradeoff was, I'll keep quiet if you sleep with me and do whatever I want.

Did you and [director] Michael Parva play around at all with which characters you would play, and which characters would be played by other actors? It was not written that way. I was supposed to narrate all that stuff, and I asked the director, "Come on, let me play them!" I cut the text down to accommodate just their quotes, and I became these people and he allowed me to do it, and I think it works very well. It's a memory play for her and it allows her to go into these different skins, not to mention her own skin as a 17 year old.

Are you surprised to be playing a 17-year-old on Broadway? It's so crazy and it's such a gift. One of the great perks of playing Irena Gut − beside the fact that I get to be blonde and blue (I have these blue contacts and this beautiful blonde wig) − is that I weigh what I weighed in ninth grade. I lost some weight in order to take away the years, in order to be live on the stage, to be a young girl, and I wanted to make sure that I didn't look matronly when I wasn't supposed to, so I needed to lose the weight. I lost 22 pounds. I'm very excited about it. The last time I was this weight was when I played Dorothy in Hello Dolly.

I've had to locate things in myself, and things in my beloved, beautiful daughter, who's now 21. Since I weigh so little, she's given me some clothes that she wanted to get rid of anyway. So even now, I'm wearing all of her clothes! I'm wandering around in her t-shirts and her brassier to reclaim my own 17-year-oldness, and these were the clothes she was wearing during her senior year when she was 17!

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Carol Rosegg

How does it feel coming from Golda's Balcony to Irena's Vow? I'm out of my mind thrilled, because I said to myself, "How do you get a two-punch if you play the prime minister of Israel in a one woman show where you play 36 people? How do you do it?" And then this came my way. In it's own way it's apples and oranges, it's a completely different animal, but it's a vast role in a 10-character play. I'm so lucky; I'm no longer alone on stage making everything up.

This play is not the intellectual exercise that Golda's Balcony, by the great William Gibson, is. This play is a heart-centered play and a heart-centered story. It's heart first, it's heart felt, and has swept us away as a cast and, I'm grateful to say (in my experience), the 100 audiences that have seen the 100 performances of this play on and off Broadway. Like Golda's Balcony, we came to Broadway on the wings of critics.

How do you approach playing these incredible women? It's what Martha Graham teaches: It's not what you give on stage; it's what you take. And when I say take, I mean take in. What you want to do is be like a ripe tomato: have a very full reservoir of feeling surrounded by a thin skin that shimmers in the morning light, that vibrates when it's in bubbling water, that responds to its environment but contains the emotion. It's been a very interesting journey and a very interesting horse to ride. You want to reign in the horse, but in order to reign in the horse you have to have the horse; you have to have the body of feeling. The history, the desire.

Irena's desire to save lives wasn't born in that second in time. Her desire to save lives came from her mother taking in stray animals in Chestahova, where they lived in Poland, and healing wounded animals and teaching the girls how to fix the wings of birds. Irena, when she was eight or nine, had a stork in her care over a winter where they mended his broken wing and put him in the wild again in April. To go from there, to nursing school, to saving lives is actually quite a direct path: that no one has the right to murder a living thing. Funny, it's kind of the Hindu aspect of Catholicism.

How does it feel to be playing a Catholic woman after all of the strong Jewish women you have played in the past? It's been a fabulous foray to me into the heart of Christianity, which I thoroughly explored when I worked for Jack O'Brien at the Old Globe theatre. And any Shakespearean play is, in fact, Catholic, even though Henry VIII had just left the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church at that time, other than the fact that it had broken from Rome, had all the Catholic rituals. I've played Isabella in Measure for Measure, I've played nuns, studied Saint Teresa for my work, but I haven't been back to that area of my studies for 20 years, so I'm very, very pleased to once again be playing a Catholic. I'm in the process to writing a letter to our new Archbishop Dolan, hoping that he will grace us with his presence at this play, Irena's Vow, which is about a Catholic woman who saves lives.

Irena's Vow, perhaps for that reason, strikes me as a very different story coming out of WWII that hasn't been told very often. People confuse the fact that because the Germans built the killing fields, built the killing factories, built the concentration camps on Polish land, that all of Poland was anti Semitic. That's just ridiculous. There are 50,000 recorded acts of heroism. I'm not saying people were angle-white all the time, 100% clean, but there were thousands and thousands of heroic acts of saving Jews by decent people, who just could not live with themselves as a murderer. Likewise, if I was in an ocean and there was a child of America's enemies drowning, I assume that, as a mother and as a human being, I would extend my hand and bring that child to shore. Even it he was the child of our enemies. What can I tell you? You don't let another human being die.

There were certain Christian rescuers during the war who were anti Semites, and they still saved Jews, because they could not live with themselves as murderers. There's a quote from Golda: "We will forgive you for killing our sons. We will never forgive you for turning our sons into killers."

I have to mention it: so many cell phones went off during the performance I saw, and the hearing aids, and I was really relieved when you mentioned something to the audience after the play. Any suggestions for how to handle these issues? It was a wild afternoon with all those cell phones! I've been in front of that audience, the New York audience, for 36 years, and they are like my living room. I love them. But, in order to protect my colleagues, when the audiences go to their next show they have to know how powerful they are in the universe, that their cell phone is powerful. Some of the shows have that thing where you have the phone going off. It's very intrusive and it rings right before the show. I actually suggested that, because when the audiences are older, it takes longer for them to get to their seats and for all we know they're still down in the restroom. Or maybe they forget! Short-term memory, after menopause, is very highly affected: You'll remember your nursery school days, but you'll forget to turn your phone off.

What I do is I just make the audience my friend. You can't fault them. If you stay with me and you love the play anyway, that's what I have to remember. And every time I hear a hard candy wrapper I have to remember that somebody may be choking and doesn't want to cough through the next 15 minutes of the play. So that's an easy one; I've gotten through the candy wrapper thing. The thing with the phone is a little more difficult. And then we have the famous teakettle: the hearing aid. And you noticed, when the hearing aid went off, I did pause. I took a breath in the opening of the play. It just kept going off and when it finally was quiet, I proceeded.

It was very gracious. It was. Irena's in direct address to the audience, so maybe there's somebody hard of hearing in the classroom? But they have to know that I know. That's important. They must know that I know. If they know I know then they'll feel accountable, at least to me, I hope, but certainly to the company. We're not watching television.

There were students in the audience that day and it struck me how accessible Irena's Vow is to children. It's only one act, Irena is actually addressing a classroom, and she has a deep love for children. How much is the show trying to reach out to schools? The show is absolutely trying to reach out to schools. If it warrants it, we might put in an extra matinee in the future. We might change our schedule to accommodate another day show and cut out an evening show. We were thrilled to have the schools there, and every seat in the balcony is $25.

This play came from Irena's love of the young people, and it became a Broadway show from her original love: "I love you. I love you from the bottom of my heart my darling children, for you are the hope, you are the hope, you see."

It sounds like you've learned a lot from Irena. I live in gratitude to Irena. She is slow to anger, quick to love. Just that alone has taught me a lot, and, how do we find the good in everybody, even people who annoy us? How are we humane? How are we human to people that we'd just as soon not engage with? Our beloved president said, "I don't want to govern by anger," and if you look at Bush's administration, the axis of evil and all that stuff, they govern by setting up both real and false opponents. Now, yes, of course the country was not, thank God, attacked again. He accomplished that very successfully, but he set up opposing forces between the United States and countries around the world. It's very tough on us. We now have to get reinstated in the world community.

The part means the world to me. The woman is my teacher, Irena Gut, and may we all be as kind and as good and as effective as she was in life.