Anne Frank Tugs at Hearts

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Imagine: it’s 1944 Amsterdam. If you are lucky enough to be able to look through a window, you will see members of the Gestapo strolling through the deserted streets with weapons on their belts and swastikas on the sleeves of their uniforms. It’s a frightening sight, not so fun to picture. But this is the world of Anne Frank, World War II’s most famous diarist and the subject of Choate’s fall theatre production.

 

Anne Frank was only 13 when she turned to the first page of her diary and began to write. She and her family would so go into hiding to escape the Nazis and their concentration camps. For the better part of three years, her family and a few others secretly lived behind a movable bookshelf in the annex of the Amsterdam office building of Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Though they survived longer than most, the group was eventually discovered. By the time V-E Day arrived, in May of 1945, Otto was the only survivor. (Anne died, likely of typhus, in early 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.) Soon after the war, Otto returned to the annex, found Anne’s diary, and decided to have it published.

 

The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in 1955, by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Choate’s production, which students before last weekend, began with a smiling picture of Anne projected onto a translucent screen. As the lights dimmed, this picture turned into a slideshow of other Frank family photographs, and, later, matching the rhythm of the music, morphed into a series of unsettling photographs of Nazi Germany. The curtain rose and the characters stepped onto a stage filled with old furniture, a stage that the actors would not leave for the entirety of the play, including the 15-minute intermission.

 

From the moment Chloe Khosrowshahi ’18, who played Anne, appeared in the doorway of the secret annex, the audience could sense her character’s enthusiasm and optimism filling the room in the midst of her family’s danger. While other characters experienced great hopelessness, Anne, with some encouragement from her father, never lost her positive outlook. The audience watched her grow and mature despite her seclusion, and transition from a restless little girl into a thoughtful adolescent.

 

Khosrowshahi explained, “At the beginning of the show, Anne is very curious. She has this excitement about everything and even though she is kind of a nuisance, she has a strong character arc, maturing while she still retains her childlike wonder.”

 

Much of the beauty of the play is found in the conversations and interactions that the characters have with each other during their time living together in the annex. Anne and her fellow hiders were forced to keep as quiet and still as possible during the daytime. They couldn’t even peek through a window curtain, for fear of discovery. After 6:00 p.m., however, the secret residents could come alive, singing, dancing, playing cards. This is how they bonded. Khosrowshahi described a similar connection between the cast. She said, “We, the actors, are all very different people with very different backgrounds, but the show itself and its contents drew us together.”

 

The Diary of Anne Frank has a certain timelessness, which allow it to connect to the fears and politics of the present world. As Ms. Ginder-Delventhal explained, “I chose Anne Frank because it’s a play about the danger of hatred, and the power of love, companionship and friendship – qualities that we need to think about because people are being killed right and left these days because of specific assumptions about their faith.”

 

The show served as a warning of the power that humans are capable of, for the good or for the bad. Ginder-Delventhal said, “Even though it appears to be a play about a Jewish girl, it is actually a play about humanity.”

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