Wrestling with the demons of war around her

"Deep inside me is a bottomless well. That is where God resides," wrote Esther (Etty) Hillesum sometime between 1941 and 1943, before she was taken to Auschwitz. "Sometimes I can reach it, but more often rocks and grit are covering the well, and then God is buried. Then he has to be excavated again."

It took actress Anne Gottlieb five years and several journeys to Amsterdam and the Westerbork Transit Camp - the place where tens of thousands of Dutch Jews were held before being sent to extermination camps in Poland - to fully understand the inner struggle of Hillesum, a young Jewish writer and mystic.

Gottlieb's deepening desire to tell Hillesum's story lies behind the play "The Wrestling Patient," which Gottlieb co-created with acclaimed playwright Kirk Lynn and Obie Award-winning director Katie Pearl. The play explores Hillesum's troubled but deeply spiritual life through the entries in her diaries. It makes its world premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts' Roberts Studio Theatre tonight through April 11, co-produced by SpeakEasy Stage Company, Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and FortyMagnolias Productions.

Hillesum began keeping her journals at age 27, nine months after her native Amsterdam was occupied by the Nazis, "to get a hold of my life" as she puts it, and to help cope with emotional volatility and depression.

"She was studying law before they closed the university down for Jews," says Gottlieb by phone. "She was struggling to figure out who she was. She was trying to keep her soul alive. And she was forced to make a lot of difficult choices."

Hillesum began her writing at the suggestion of analyst Julius Spier, the founder of psycho-chirology (the study of palm prints in psychology). It was her writing that got her through, at least initially, the struggle of having loving but mentally ill family members and the terror of having World War II closing in all around her.

As her spiritual faith deepened, she joined the Jewish Council, a German-controlled organization created to maintain law and order among the Jewish population. But she ended up serving as a tool of the Nazis to deport Jews. Once on the council, Hillesum was faced with the choice of dictating who went and who didn't go.

It was made worse when her family arrived in Westerbork, and in order to save them Hillesum had terrible decisions to make.

"She's trying to help her family and stay awake in her soul," says Gottlieb. "We worked really hard to make a play that is not about the tragic ending but the resistance and the work people do within themselves. It matters."

As for the title of "The Wrestling Patient," Lynn says it refers to Hillesum herself. Spier, explains the playwright, "employed the strange practice of wrestling with those clients whose therapy needed a little shaking up. . . . It was the singularly odd act of Etty answering her therapist's challenge, grabbing him around the waist and pinning him to the ground which initially inspired the choice."

Beyond that, Lynn and his collaborators saw wrestling as a powerful metaphor for the way Hillesum grappled with the war around her. "As the Nazis were trying to close the world off to Etty, psychology was opening up vast inner resources," Lynn says. And they viewed the word "patient" as particularly resonant. As Lynn notes, "One of the last sentences written in Etty's journals was a quote from Rilke, 'Patience is all.' "

Tickets: 617-933-8600, www.bostontheatrescene.com

At 39, Evan Brenner was totally lost.

He was broke. He had no relationship. He grew disillusioned and depressed. He didn't know what to do with his life.

He turned to Buddha.

Now, at 42, Brenner has a new one-man play, "The Buddha: In His Own Words," making its world premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts' Plaza Black Box theater through April 4, to be followed by a run at the Cambridge Family YMCA April 10-12..

"It opens with his death and goes through his enlightenment," Brenner says by phone from New York. "It's told from beyond the grave."

Brenner, who majored in drama and religion at Vassar College before getting his master's in dramatic writing, says he was in a very dark place in his life when he sought the wisdom of Buddhism. But he was confused by the vast array of Buddhist teachings. So he went to the Pali canon, a massive collection of early Buddhist writings. It was a huge undertaking.

"The whole thing was peeling back the onion of Buddhist philosophy," he says. "What caught my imagination was not only the doctrine, but the story of the man."

Inspired, he decided to synthesize the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, from the point when, at the age of 29, he looked at his wife and daughter sleeping before taking off on his journey to his discovery of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the Middle Way. The play explores his struggles, triumphs, and the tragedy that ended his life, says Brenner.

It's no dry tale, says Brenner, who considers the Buddha's life among the greatest of adventure stories.

"There are as many stories of the life of the Buddha as there are tellers," he says. "My telling is humanist. It highlights the notion of ongoing spiritual struggle and challenges for everybody, including the Buddha."

At the BCA: 617-933-8600, www.bostontheatrescene.com. At the YMCA: 800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com

Jim True-Frost, best known for his role as a bumbling cop-turned-teacher on HBO's "The Wire," will join father and daughter Will and Georgia Lyman in a free reading of Eugene O'Neill's play "Anna Christie" Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Boston Center for the Arts' Plaza Theatre, presented by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. The event is free, but donations to support the company's programming will be accepted.

Information: 617-426-0863, www.commshakes.org