Jan 18, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

Because Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” has been required reading for so many years, those who are familiar with her story might not realize she has a stepsister who still is alive and living in London.

Eva Schloss, 88, continues to tour the world, sharing memories of the time she spent with the eventual Holocaust victim when they were neighbors and playmates in Amsterdam, prior to members of both their families being sent to concentration camps. Widower Otto Frank, Anne’s father, married Eva’s widowed mother, Elfriede Geiringer, in 1953.

Mt. Lebanon High School alumnus J.E. Ballantyne Jr. got to know Schloss in the late 1990s, when he directed a Prime Stage Theatre Company show in Pittsburgh about her life.

Suitably inspired, he eventually wrote the play “Images: Remembrances of the Holocaust, The Eva Schloss Story.” His company, J&B Production Arts Services of Youngstown, Ohio, will present “Images” at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 1 in the fine arts theater at Ballantyne’s alma mater, with a show for students scheduled earlier in the day.

Ballantyne said that when he came up with the idea for the play, he told Schloss:

“One of the reasons I want to do this is, whether you want to admit it or not, the day is going to come when you can’t continue to travel and do the things you do. This show will be in there in your place to tell your story.”

Performing as Schloss in the one-woman play is Ohio actress Tari Lyn Bergoine.

“She’s interviewed by an unseen reporter,” Ballantyne explained, “and that kind of helps move the story along and moves it in certain directions.”

The production incorporates multimedia components.

“There’s a video that accompanies it, which kind of helps to underscore what she’s talking about,” Ballantyne said. “She’ll talk about her parents and when they told her and her brother they were going into hiding. Then we’ll go into a live-action video of them doing that.”

He first thought about bringing the play to Mt. Lebanon while on a tour of the newly renovated high school, with its pair of state-of-the-art theaters, for his class’ 50-year reunion.

“This place is amazing,” he said. “We thought it was big when we were here in ’66. Well, that was nothing compared to this.”

A few years before that, he had his first shot at performing while in junior high. Well, sort of:

“They had auditions for a show called ‘Beat It, Beatnik,’ and I had nothing to do, so I auditioned and I got cast in this dumb thing,” Ballantyne recalled. “And they never actually performed it. The school canceled it, for some reason. We never found out why. We rehearsed it, but they never did it.”

He did better the next year at the high school, under the tutelage of the late Julian Myers, a charter inductee to the national Educational Theatre Association Hall of Fame.

“That’s when I really started getting into doing a lot of theater,” Ballantyne said. “So being able to come back and bring this back to where I started, basically, is really interesting. I think it’s a full-circle kind of thing.”

During his Feb. 1 visit to the high school, he and others involved in the production will visit classrooms after the show to speak with students one-on-one about it. Also, half-price tickets for the evening performance are being offered to Mt. Lebanon, Upper St. Clair and Keystone Oaks high school students, along with Mt. Lebanon students attending Mellon and Jefferson middle schools.

For more information, visit www.imagestickets.com or call 330-799-6176.