'Letters' delivered to area students

It was a year ago when Lakewood Ranch’s Terri Vitale saw a performance of “Letters from Anne and Martin,” while attending a Florida Philanthropic Network summit in Miami.

That performance is a dramatic reading that combines the writings of Holocaust victim Anne Frank and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.,

When her daughter, junior Sydney Sforzo, began her new semester at The Out-of-Door Academy, Vitale recognized how her daughter had been learning about the power of conversation and new ways to think in her English class.

She started to think about both her daughter and son, Ryan Sforzo, an IMG freshman, and how they could benefit from seeing a performance of “Letters from Anne and Martin.”

So Vitale asked Sydney for help making it happen.

On Feb. 6, “Letters from Anne and Martin,” as performed by actors from The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York, will take the stage at ODA. That performance will be attended only by ODA students and faculty.

The public performance will be at 7 p.m., Feb. 5  at Temple Beth Sholom, 1050 S. Tuttle Ave., Sarasota. Tickets are $30 for general admission and  $10 for students.

“It’s really powerful the way they present it,” said Vitale, who chaired the drive to bring the performance to the area along with her daughter and Sarasota lawyer Chip Gaylor. “It makes you more mindful of the power of words and leadership and vision. It makes you mindful we can all treat each other a little better.”

After returning from the Florida Philanthropic Network summit in February 2018, Vitale eventually shared notes about her experience during a board meeting of the Community Foundation of Sarasota. Gaylor, who also is on the foundation’s board, said he was interested in bringing the performance to the area as well.

A collaboration of nonprofits — the Sarasota County Bar Association Diversity and Inclusion Committee, the Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee, Embracing Our Differences and The Boxser Diversity Initiative — worked in tandem to host the show.

Sarah Wertheimer, executive director of Embracing Our Differences, a Sarasota-based nonprofit that uses art and education to celebrate diversity, said her organization brought an exhibit from the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect to the area about two years ago, and she already had been interested in bringing “Letters from Anne and Martin” to the area.

“There’s so many lessons to be learned from Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr.,” Wertheimer said. “It’s the value of acceptance, the value of inclusion, history.”

Vitale said she was surprised to learn Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born the same year — 1929 — and although Frank wrote her famous diary as a teenager and King wrote his letter from the Birmingham, Ala. jail as a 34-year-old, their messages are powerful. At the conference she attended in Miami, the audience engaged in a facilitated post-performance discussion.

“The people engaged and spoke candidly,” Vitale said. “There was a lot of hope in the conversation.”

Sforzo, who will speak to the audience after the Feb. 5 performance, said students who see the show will understand their viewpoints are shaped by their own experiences.

“The takeaway, especially for the students, is to make them open and aware, to expose them to something they otherwise would not know about,” she said.