"Draw what you see."

It's a common instruction art teachers give their students, but when Friedl gently prods a young girl to give it a try, the four simple words take on a much more poignant meaning in "Fireflies," an affecting new work by Chicago playwright Charmaine Spencer, now making its premiere at 6th @ Penn in a finely cast production directed by Dale Morris.

Friedl in this case is none other than Austrian-born artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and the girl just one of the hundreds of children to whom she gave art classes in the Theresienstadt concentration camp (Terezín, Czechoslovakia) from 1942 until her transport two years later to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she and most of her students died at the hands of the Nazis.

"Transporting" - Artist Unknown

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Theresienstadt was something of a rarity among the camps, as it became something of a "model ghetto" to show the Red Cross visitors and the rest of the world how "well" the Jews were living in the Third Reich. For those two years, Dicker-Brandeis nurtured her young charges' creativity, telling them simply to "draw what you see."

Drawing the things they saw -- hunger, executions, friends and family members climbing into boxcars never to be seen again -- turned out to be a very useful form of art therapy, just as psychologists were beginning to understand its applications. Even though Dicker-Brandeis and most of the children were among those murdered, she managed to hide two suitcases filled with over 4,000 of the children's drawings. Discovered after the war, and now on display in a Prague synagogue, they serve as a vivid testament to the power of art to transform its creators as well as those who view it.

Spencer's play spends a large part of its 70 or so minutes focusing on its characters' preparations for a performance of the children's opera "Brundibár" (written by inmate Hans Krása) for the visiting Red Cross delegation. As Leo (Luis Quiroz), one of the older children puts it, though, "It's a puppet show, and we're the puppets." Quiroz's Leo is just gawky enough in his somewhat "Peter-and-Anne" scenes with the winsome Rebecca (Zoe Katz), but otherwise burns with an adolescent fury toward their Nazi captors.

It is curious, though, that Spencer names the character after the real-life Leo Katz, who perished in the camps in 1944, yet clearly haves her Leo Katz survive the war by bringing him back in the last scene. Altering historical facts in drama is commonplace, but merely assigning the character an entirely different name altogether might be more of a tribute to the historical Katz than having him erroneously survive.

The adorable Becca Myers tugs at the heartstrings as Friedl's youngest student, but Maddy Bersin has virtually no stage time and even less significance as a fourth student (she does, however, go on in Katz' role on August 5, according to the program).

Tony Beville is alternately tender as Friedl's husband Pavel and downright frightening as the unnamed German officer.

It is the remarkable Beth Bayless, though, as Friedl, who holds the piece together more than anyone. Her fear is underlying, as though she were perpetually walking on eggshells, but she still elicits a relative lightheartedness for the sake of the children, even encouraging the littlest one to get "rainbow-fingered for all" to see.

Would that we all could find such a rosy outlook in the gloomiest of circumstances.