Final run of “Janka” at Fresno’s 2nd Space Theatre

You watch as Janice Noga transforms.

One minute, she’s answering questions about a revival of “Janka,” the one-woman show she took off Broadway in 2015. The next, she is Janka, slipping into the accent as she pulls lines out of the air, as if memories from a life lived.

“I can talk like this,” Noga says. And then, back in her own voice, “that’s how Janka talked.”

Noga and husband (and playwright) Oscar Speace have spent the past two decades producing the play from their home in Fresno’s Tower District. They have staged 178 performances in all; first in Los Angeles, then in Fresno and New York and in Europe.

At 180, the show will retire.

The final performances of “Janka” are Sept. 8 and 9 at Fresno’s 2nd Space Theatre. Tickets are $50, with a champagne reception to follow. “It’s been quite a journey,” Noga says of her decades-long run with the play and its lead character.

The story of Janka Festinger

“Janka” is the true-to-life story of Speace’s mother, Janka Festinger, a Romanian immigrant and holocaust survivor. The work is based on her own words, handwritten in a notebook just months after her liberation from Auschwitz in 1945.

It’s 60 pages of penciled, cursive script that Speace had to have translated from the original Hungarian. It took him a full summer of weekend sessions and the help of a professor at Fresno State.

It was a trying process. The translator would cry, Noga says.

Speace would cry.

Then, he would come home and share what he’d learned.

“Then,” Noga says, “I would cry.”

Oscar Speace, left, with his wife Janice Noga, holds an album including photographs of his mother Janke Festinger, during an interview Friday, Aug. 7, 2026 in Fresno. Janke, a Romanian Jew, lived through concentration camps in WWII and wrote a 60-page letter about her life which her son Oscar turned into a one-woman theatrical production. His wife Janice, who has portrayed Janka in the past, will present as Janka again for two final shows at Second Space in Fresno. ERIC PAUL ZAMORA ezamora@fresnobee.com

It’s a story of forced labor and death.

Janka lost 63 members of her family in a single year. Yet, she survived.

“And we found out how Janka survived,” Speace says.

The writing runs parallel to Elie Wiesel’s 1956 book “Night,” he says. Where Wiesel tells the story of the men who were at Auschwitz, Janka wrote of the women who were there, he says.

“Janka” live on stage

Speace turned the translated pages into an hour-and-a-half stage show. It would eventually get cut by a half-hour for its run off Broadway. And while the State Jewish Theater of Bucharest optioned the play for a run of performances in the 2010s (starring Romanian film actress Maia Morgenstern), Noga has otherwise been alone in her portrayal of Janka.

It hasn’t been easy.

A brain surgery in 1994 left Noga with unable to memorize material in the way she had early in her acting career.

For a decade, she performed the show from a stool, as a kind of staged reading. But when she went to New York, the director insisted she do the show off-book, with full blocking and stage production. She spent seven months in near-daily rehearsals, running the lines with her husband, or with a fellow actor she hired on for the help.

“It consumes your life,” Noga says.

In April, Noga started the whole routine again.

She is ahead of schedule. She’s committed the full play to memory. Now, she’ll begin working on the blocking and simple stage direction.

The challenge was part of staging this final run of shows, Noga says. She hasn’t performed as Janka since 2020 and needed to know if she could do it again, whether “that feeling of her presence would still be here.”

It is.

But these final shows are about the audience as much as the artist.

“Janka” only exists because of the support Noga and Speace have received. The bulk of the $70,000 needed for its New York production was raised by supporters in the central San Joaquin Valley. Among the Fresnans who traveled to see the performance was former Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims. Her review to The Fresno Bee: “She really doesn’t know how good she is.”

Says Noga: “We wanted to thank the audiences that have come year after year after year.

“They know Janka as well as I do.”

While this will be the last time Noga inhabits Janka on stage, it won’t be the last time she shares the story. The couple would love to option the story to a major movie studio. Noga jokes that Steven Spielberg could find a really famous actress to do it. And there is a screenplay. During the pandemic, Noga and her husband produced their own movie version of “Janka,” which aired on PBS. They now screen the movie on tours around the world.

That work will continue.

The story is too important to not be shared, Noga says.

“I believe we are storytellers. It’s up to us.”

Janice Noga holds her Star of David as she talks about her upcoming last two performances of Janke during an interview Friday, Aug. 7, 2026 in Fresno. ERIC PAUL ZAMORA ezamora@fresnobee.com Janice Noga holds a poster from her New York performance of Janke during an interview Friday, Aug. 7, 2026 in Fresno. ERIC PAUL ZAMORA ezamora@fresnobee.com

This story was originally published August 13, 2026 at 11:40 AM.

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