Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
The characters, too, become reduced to doll-house figurines; despite the concealment of their compressed lives, their fears, secrets and desires remain ‘on ice,’ on display, for all the world to see. Tolerated ‘voyeurs’ to their prison-house existence, we a privy to a world in miniature: the inmates’ conflicts and keen emotions forever simmering on the verge of explosion due to their enforced containment, their unnatural pressure-cooker lives.
Sweet-tempered Edith Frank, played by Sally Singal, who first entered her war-time confinement in a state of nervous collapse, morphs into murderous Harpy when she spies a fellow inmate stealing food from ‘the mouths of her children.’
Her daughter, Anne Frank, played by Natasha Greenblatt, learns to temper her youthful exuberance, and transmute her thoughts and feelings—transmute herself, that is—into her diaries. Scribbling late at night, she is illuminated by a pool of lamplight while the sleeping house falls into shadow. As the months grind by, this familiar spotlight illuminates her own rite of passage, her pain-joyful evolution from reckless teenager to somberly conscious young woman.
In marked contrast, by the second year of their confinement, Anne’s docile elder sister, Margot, (Susanna Fournier) gradually sinks into inertia, listlessness and despair.
In between the sudden moments of terror at being discovered, this hermetic community continues to try to live as ‘normally’ as possible, Despite the ever present danger, the stage dialogue, adapted from the original by Wendy Kesselman, is light, naturalistic, sometimes lyrical and often unrelentingly comic.
Natasha Greenblatt as Anne is superb; her charismatic stage presence exudes confidence, grace and poise. Being the youngest of the ‘house arrestees,’ she is also the most creative, the most resilient and the most hopeful. Felicia Shulman shines as the vibrant, gossipy, flirty and mercurial Mrs. Van Daan.
The men soon exhibit their best and worst attributes under the strain of enforced togetherness. Otto Frank (Nicholas Rice), perennial peacemaker; Mr. Van Daan (James Downing), explosive family despot; Peter Van Daan (Gianpaolo Venuta), his solitary withdrawn son; and Mr. Dussel (Brian Wrench) their petulant, irascible fellow refugee.
Meanwhile, we listen in on brief snatches of Radio Free Europe broadcasts as well as Nazi edicts and high-octane guttural curses and threats. Day after day brings a continuous ebb and flow of fearful inchoate sounds and echoes, creaks and thumps of an empty house—whether mice, rats, burglars or the Gestapo—all signifying danger.
Elli Bunton’s costumery is decorous and full of nostalgia, a vivid re-creation of stylish vintage ‘forties, both in its excess and war-time privations—Anne’s treasured high-heeled shoes, Mrs. Van Daan’s winter furs—flamboyant luxury reduced to mere bodily protection, and all of it to be relinquished in the end.
What is most striking is how inert and passive people become when confronting massive force and intimidation. The greater might, no matter how evil, prevails. In this instance, precious little energy is vented dissecting right from wrong. These lunatic conditions are accepted, a priori, even becoming a fact of life, bizarrely normal. All residual sense of outrage is muted, then silenced altogether; bare-bones pragmatism reigns. We witness the struggles of a tiny group of human beings, reduced to the status of cornered rats. Yet still, the ingenious mind and collaborating spirit tries to find ways, seemingly impossible ways, to thwart one’s oppressors in the urgent drive to survive.
Director, Marcia Kash, captures the essence of this ‘reality’ narrative and transforms it to iconic theatre: the human destiny of those who, despite impossible odds, manage to transmit an indestructible heritage to successive generations. Their legacy helps to re-establish the norms of common justice, rebalance the scales, redress the wrongs and set things back to rights. And amongst the countless individuals who lived through those bleak times, it is Anne who is remembered as the one who lived, died, and continues to live through the evangelizing power the written word.
And precisely because of Anne’s salvaged journals, what hangs somberly over all this theatrical artifice is the backstory-knowledge that these stage enactments are as close to the literal truth as any can be. These horrors, and worse, have happened. Do happen. Continue to happen—whatever particular form they may take in the world, wherever conditions permit them to exist.
As for the Frank family and their captive friends in August, 1944, when the Gestapo (themselves under siege from the invading Allies) abruptly raided the attic bunker and dragged them away like a nestful of rats, we the audience, fascinated and stunned, fatalistic and inert—like most of the world of that time—we watched, and we watched, and we did nothing.