"Toward a living future" - Assistant Director Elizabeth Creely on "The Diary of Anne Frank"

Helping a play come to life is an amazing experience; acting as the Assistant Director for Custom Made Theater’s production of the “The Diary of Anne Frank” was no exception. Playwright Wendy Kesselman’s 1991 adaptation emphasizes the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Secret Annex. The doomed inhabitants of 963 Prinsengracht Place seem to be in some sort of purgatory; not truly incarcerated, in the correct sense of the word and yet certainly not free. They occupied the annex for two and a half years before they were discovered and sent east, to the death camps.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett first adapted the diary for a play in 1955. Kesselman’s version is significantly different. It challenges our perceptions of who Anne really was. Was she a sprightly young girl, wise beyond her years? Or an indulged, attention-seeking teen, who disliked her mother? Kesselman attempts to come to terms with the emotionally tumultuous young girl in part through directing our attention to Anne’s adolescence itself. Anne entered the annex just as her body entered puberty. Along with the demands of hiding, she had the additional challenge of contending with the onset of reproductive maturity and adolescent sexuality, in an atmosphere that couldn’t provide much, if any, privacy. In this atmosphere of constant intrusion and interruption, she finds solace in the pages of her diary, confessing there to a moment of same sex desire, the beginning of her menstrual cycle, and the delightfully bewildering sensuality she feels with her adolescent body and mind. “ I feel spring...spring awakening!” she says to us, her audience. “ I long for every boy!” Very different from the depictions of the sprightly, and chaste Anne many American children read about in high school classrooms.

This is a young girl who is waking up, quickly- maybe too quickly?- to the pleasures and seductions of adult sexuality. No wonder her mother worries about Anne’s frequent visits to the attic, where Peter awaits her. “It’s cold up in the attic”, Mrs. Frank says.” You’d better bundle up”. What tension her mother must have experienced, watching her daughter grow, knowing that a sweater is flimsy protection against the lure of sexuality. “ We can’t call any doctors,” says Mr. Frank in the beginning of the play.” We can’t get sick”. The management of all eight bodies- adult and child- would have been a constant source of tension and threat, especially the rapid growth of the adolescents, growing so surely to adulthood.

To the Bay Area audience, the admissions of a maturing young girl may not seem unduly shocking. Her father, Otto Frank, excised these portions from her diary in order to give her the privacy he couldn’t while they were in hiding. He may also have felt that Anne’s feelings were a distraction from what really needed to be discussed: the rigors of self-imprisonment and Hitler’s intent to eliminate European Jewish culture as systematically as possible- one Jewish family, one Jewish individual- at a time. The horrors of World War II were the reason the diary was published and the play, and film, written. Not Anne’s growing body. Future audiences needed to remember, to never forget.

Forgetting- or setting aside- exactly what happened to the Franks, Van Daans’ and Mr. Dussel was unavoidable for me, at least for the first few weeks of the rehearsal period. This is when important production priorities are met: actors get “off book” and internalize their dialogue; they synch their dialogue with the map of movement and motion the director has choreographed; the director, the actors and the crew discuss motivation and prop needs; the technical director lights the playing space; the sound technician creates a world of sound: all of this needs to be planned and negotiated, as the cast and crew commit themselves to the huge task of mastering the elements of a fully staged production.

But at some point, it became impossible for me to ignore what was being reenacted. I watched bodies get herded out of a room at gunpoint. I saw a mother and her two children watch, helpless, as their beloved husband and father is taken from them. And during Otto Frank’s closing monologue, I heard of the fates of each of the eight inhabitants of the Secret Annex. “Auschwitz. Separation.” says Mr. Frank, reciting the location and circumstance of each death. “Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt. Date of death unknown. Mr. Dussel dies in Neuengamme.” Date of death unknown. Precise location of body? Impossible to establish. Last words, last thoughts? Unrecorded. Their bodies? Destroyed. Finally deprived of life, the children’s growth stopped forever.

Which is why the inclusion of Anne’s monologue about her sexual desire and growing awareness of her adult body matter so much. This is where the play became real to me; it is during this monologue that I felt Anne’s spirit become animate. It was also because of very skilled acting by 15-year old Julia Belanoff, who plays Anne with such insight and sensitivity. “I’m lucky. I’ve been healthy. In fact, I’ve been growing!” Anne says, exultantly, in a monologue during the second act. It’s during this monologue that the Final Solution, international in scope and impact, becomes personal: Hitler and his allies meant for Anne not to grow. Not to gain a shoe size; never to wear a bra and certainly not to get her period. Her body may have vanished, but we have her words to reassure us that she experienced growth, spiritual, sexual. Like a healthy plant compressed under a glass container, Anne’s body continued to develop, as long as it could. During that last two and a half years, it unknowingly resisted the Nazi’s plans, as fundamentally as the French resistance defied the Vichy regime or as the Dutch resisted the Nazi invasion of Holland. Anne is notable because she wrote; she is heart-wrenchingly ordinary at the same time. She was one of many adolescent Jewish girls in Europe, all dreaming of adulthood, all thinking of themselves in the future tense, and all watching, with pleasure, apprehension and anticipation, their bodies reach forward through time, toward a living future.