Global stage
‘Diary of Anne Frank’ relevant to turbulent current events
Are Americans beginning to forget the Holocaust? That was the implication of a survey released last month finding that 22 percent of Millennials had never heard of it, or weren’t sure — double the rate for U.S. adults overall. And two in five in the younger cohort grossly underestimated the human toll of Hitler’s death camps, guessing that fewer than 2 million had died there.
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So time couldn’t be riper for Arizona Theatre Company’s revival of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the stage adaptation of the memoir of the Jewish teenager who recorded her innermost thoughts while hiding from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
“There’s this quote that’s attributed to Joseph Stalin, of all people, that I keep going back to and kept quoting to the cast, which is that the death of a single person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic,” says David Ira Goldstein, Arizona Theatre’s artistic director emeritus, who has returned to direct the final title he selected for the company he led for 25 years.
“Nothing illustrates that more than this play,” he says. “We can’t wrap our mind around the magnitude of what’s going on with the Rohingya (in Myanmar), or even some of the things that our happening in our own country. But we can wrap our minds around a single person.”
Originally published in Dutch in 1947 as “The Diary of a Young Girl,” Anne Frank’s poignant coming-of-age story (and its tragic denouement) is the archetypal Holocaust narrative. Often taught in schools, it holds a place alongside “To Kill a Mockingbird” as one of the books that have awoken generations to global injustices — by making them personal.
Goldstein’s cast includes a scion of America’s Jewish intelligentsia, Naama Potok, daughter of Chaim Potok, author of “The Chosen” and “My Name Is Asher Lev.” Raised in a family of Holocaust survivors, she has had a 30-year career acting on stages across the country. She plays Anne’s strait-laced mother, Edith.
“Art can never tell us what really happened in the Holocaust, because people would get up and shriek and run, which is the healthy response,” Potok says. “But between doing nothing and doing (too much), there is an enormous amount that can be shared and revealed.”
Potok researched her character extensively and says she is most excited to return to this play because Goldstein is using a revised script (by Wendy Kesselman) that incorporates passages from the original diaries that weren’t made public until decades after “Young Girl” was published, some of them focused on Anne’s private thoughts about her emerging sexuality.
“She was transforming on so many levels, her psyche, her soul, her body, her thoughts, her feelings, and she was quite trenchant in the way that she wrote and articulate, so what Wendy Kesselman integrated into the play is quite raw ... and beautifully articulated,” she says.
Kesselman’s script also weaves in other survivor accounts and, Potok says, gives a richer portrait of its characters with a particular cultural bond.
“Otto Frank (Anne’s father, and the family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust) originally didn’t want the play to be a Jewish play, for a number of reasons,” Potok says. “He wanted it to be a play about tolerance, and he thought it would alienate non-Jewish audiences. I have thoughts about what I think he missed in doing that; however, he also might have had his finger on the pulse of what people were and were not ready to hear yet. And this play doesn’t shy away from that, which is a much more honest account of who these people were.”
For Goldstein, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is more relevant than ever.
“Last month on the front page of your newspaper was a story about how antiSemitic incidents in Arizona had tripled last year,” he says. “Since I picked the play, we had Charlottesville, we’ve got the Polish senate saying it’s against the law to refer to the Polish Holocaust, even though 3 (million) of the 6 million that died died in Poland.
“Syria’s been on my mind a lot because of ‘Diary of Anne Frank,’ and one of the things that came up a lot in rehearsals was how the United States turned away so many Jewish refugees during World War II and how they even turned away boats that were headed to the United States, and that seems to be what we’re doing right now with Syria.
“There’s currently a Holocaust denier running for Congress in Illinois. I could go on and on. Authoritarian governments are on the rise all over the world. So the play becomes more topical by the minute.”