She calls herself Naava. She has red hair. Maybe it is dyed. She speaks with a distinct South-African accent. She is tall and beautiful, with a striking dignity and inner confidence. She is young, enjoying the prime of one who redefines the concept of middle age with every birthday celebrated.She is Naava Piatka, playwright, actress, musician. She was on campus this Saturday and Sunday performing her one-woman show, "Better Don't Talk," which she wrote about her mother.

Her mother is Chayela Rosenthal, a Jewish Pole, an actress, a superstitious Yiddish mother. Her face is wrinkled. Her humor is dry and witty, but never intentionally offensive. Chayela began her acting career in the ghettos of Poland. Her brother, Layb, wrote songs for her to perform. "I love te-a-ture." And throughout her life, Chayela dons a smile and make-up and presents herself before the world that has treated her more than harshly.

Naava does not meet her mother, the true Chayela Rosenthal, the Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto, until after Chayela's death. "We didn't even know she was dying." The actress-mother had fooled them all, hiding a past filled with oppressive memories from her daughter and her public, running from the nightmarish horrors of a childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. "Better don't talk."

But Naava Piatka is not like her mother. She refuses to hide from the past, no matter how painful. She unburies her mother's hidden stories, stories about coming home to a fatherless house, stories about being forced to move to the ghettos, stories about being torn away from her mother and brother in the death camps. "I survived," she says with a shrug, and something of a tired wink. "What more is there to say?"

But Piatka will talk. She will tell her mother's story. Her self-written and self-performed play has no pretense of being a piece solely about the Holocaust; it is Piatka's own method of reconstructing the mother that she never knew, the mother who has found the voice to share her story.

It is hard to determine which role would be harder for the actress. Piatka portrays her own deceased mother as a humorous caricature, but one with very real and very human weaknesses. It is not just close to home. It is close to the soul. Many would be terrified to venture to such depths. Many would be unable.

Then again, Piatka also is forced to act as herself on stage, attempting to pull off a precarious performer's bluff. How do you become your part, when your part is already you? That which is real and that which is character no longer matter. They cannot be distinguished. "Don't lose yourself, Naava" - you can almost hear director, Joann Green Breuer, coaxing the seasoned actress - "you might not come back."

But, Piatka does not stumble off the tightrope gymnastics course she has construed for herself. To the relief of the audience, who experience vicarious anxiety over the actress's precarious position, Piatka switches characters, portraying both herself and her mother, seamlessly and gracefully.

Piatka's work switches genre as often as the playwright herself changes character, which adds even more to the intensity of the play. The piece is a conglomeration of narrative, dialogue, monologue, musical and pantomime. Many times the actress will hold full conversations with ghosts that haunt the auditorium with their stories. The effect is eerie. The audience leaves in silence.

Piatka's success is a testimony to her own courage and self-confidence in venturing deep into her own personal soul and past, in addition to her renowned talent as a playwright and as an actress. "Better Don't Talk" is gripping not only because of its heavy subject matter, but because of the humanness and vulnerability of the actress in portraying her own past in order to share her mother's story.

"We live forever."

"We are still here.