Anne Frank at Ashland
*It Can’t Happen Here*/Play Review/: “The Diary of Anne Frank,” /Angus Bowmer Theater//,
//Oregon// Shakespeare Festival, //Ashland//./
A thought experiment: Suppose our duly elected Great Decider proclaims a
class of enemies that pose a life-or-death challenge to all we hold
dear. A threat so dire that our Unitary Executive must assume power to
unilaterally determine who is or is not an enemy.
And suppose the Executive could detain these deemed enemies
indefinitely, or inflict upon them any degree of degradation or torture,
even unto death. All without having to explain, justify or even declare
any of what’s done, as long as it’s targeted at “enemies.”
Suppose the Decider erected a vast archipelago of camps and pens to
process these detainees. How vast? Don’t ask; the question itself is so
treasonous it could get you into trouble. After all, the same Executive
has also ordained a secret system of domestic surveillance – all for
your own protection in ways that are, specifically speaking, none of
your damn business.
So how, just as a thought experiment, to retain your basic humanity
under such circumstances? Of course the whole grotesque set-up is almost
unimaginable to modern Americans. Yet that was the milieu in which Anne
Frank, a Jewish teen, had to come of age in Nazi-occupied Holland.
For two years, 1942-44, her whole world was bounded by a pinched garret
suite atop an office block. There Anne, together with her parents and
older sister plus another middle-aged couple and their teenaged son, hid
out from the Gestapo. They were joined, early on, by another stray
refugee, a dentist.
Crammed into such close quarters, the oddly matched octet went through a
whole gamut of responses, from altruistic mutual solicitude to cheating
and bickering. The mood in the garret could swing from holiday gaiety to
cowering terror at the merest creak of a floorboard downstairs.
A key component of Anne’s particular recipe for retaining humanity was
her diary. The book was lost when the Nazis finally burst into the
hide-out. But, after the war, Anne’s father – the group’s sole survivor
of the death camps – retrieved the precious record from the wreckage of
the garret.
Published in English in 1952, the Diary immediately turned Anne into the
poster child for the Holocaust – all the more so after the Broadway
(1955) and Hollywood (1959) versions. Putting a particular (and winsome)
face on the millions of martyred innocents helped Americans get their
minds around the unprecedented enormity of the genocide.
Sadly, we’ve all learned a lot more about genocide since then, so the
simplistic Anne Frank of those early editions now seems less persuasive.
It turns out that Anne’s father, in line with the assimilationist
instincts of war-traumatized Jewry and the strident conformity of 1950’s
America, had toned down the initial versions of the Diary. Gone were
many particularly Jewish allusions, all reference to Anne’s sexual
awakening and much philosophical speculation about the evil that had
overtaken her world.
Instead we were left with what became Anne’s signature quote: “In spite
of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Well, she /did / write those words and they /do/ resonate with our
innate American optimism.
But, plucked out of context like that, the quote sanitizes Anne as a
character and trivializes the hideous mystery of the Holocaust. A fresh
1997 stage adaptation by Wendy Kesselman went back to the original diary
text to restore much of the lost depth.
For instance, the famously upbeat closing quote is balanced out with
Anne’s anguish at how “the world is…transformed into a wilderness.” And
all these ruminations are summarily cut off by the brutal endgame
(unshown in the 1950’s versions) of the Nazi raid.
This is the script that director James Edmondson chose for the Ashland
production. To emphasize the claustrophobia of their confinement, he has
all eight of the refugees onstage together almost all the time. Thanks
to set designer Richard Hay’s multilevel cutaway dollhouse-style set, we
get to view all the rooms of the garret at once.
Laura Morache, in the title role, moves from room to room, lighting up
each scene with her incandescent performance. Anyone who has ever raised
(or been) a teenager knows well the world of difference between a
13-year-old and a 15-year-old, the age span Anne covered in hiding.
Morache explores this unfolding personality in all its nuance.
Others in the cast also make full use of the richer characterizations in
the Kimmelman script. Anne’s father (Tony DeBruno) is impressively
judicious and her mother (Linda Alper) forbearing and empathic.
The other couple (Catherine Coulson and Michael Hume) both falter as the
privations of hiding magnify their private vices. But they stand by each
other in one of the play’s most affecting scenes. And the puppy love
between their son (John Tufts) and Anne is all the more poignant in
light of the inevitable ending.
These garret denizens, of course, are all on the Executive enemy-list of
their era. They’re branded with the hated yellow star that leaves its
indelible trace even after it’s been peeled off in the “freedom” of a
hide-out. For them, the riddle of how to retain humanity in a time of
horror is relatively simple: all they can do is lay low and try to grow,
even in deepest shadow.
Tougher choices face such non-“enemies” as the Gentile protectors
(played by Linda Morris and Brad Whitmore) who, at infinite personal
risk, usher the refugees into hiding, provision them for the duration
and guard their secret.
And what of the other non-“enemies” who never appear onstage? Not the
collaborationists who back up the Gestapo raid, but rather the simple
multitude who merely got on with their lives. Did they just not know
what was going on? Or did they /choose/ not to know? Were they, as Anne
dares to hope, “good at heart?” Or were they complicit in mega-crimes?
How would they have voted, given the chance?
Labels: Reviews
