'The Diary of Anne Frank' Online

[On 19 May, I published “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report” on Rick On Theater.  That was my collaboration with Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to ROT, reporting our impressions of putting on a live play-reading online.  In that post, I mentioned that after seeing Kirk's presentation, I watched an online performance of The Diary of Anne Frank and that I’d be blogging on it soon.  Well, now here’s my report on that experience.

[Social Dramatics, as Kirk and his group called their reading, was my first experience with any kind of online theater.  Anne Frank is my first full production of a play intended for virtual performance.  I have tried to cover this performance as a total theatrical event, though I am by no means technically proficient regarding IT and computers.  I have done my best, however, to describe my experience with Anne Frank both as a piece of drama and as a virtual production.]

My cousin Bill in New Jersey called me one afternoon in early May, just to check on how I’m doing here in the city during the coronavirus pandemic.  I mentioned that I had become occupied with my blog, trying to find material to fill the slots that would ordinarily be taken up with my play reports. 

With the closing of the theaters in mid-March, I was bereft of my staple topic for Rick On Theater.  I had several shows scheduled in May and June, plus some my theater companion and I were considering, all of which got cancelled, along with everything else.  Aside from being fodder for the blog (blodder?), I missed it.

I also mentioned that I had just watched a play-reading on Zoom (see my collaborative post with the playwright Kirk Woodward, “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report,” on 19 May), which had been my first experience with virtual theater on the ’Net.  The next thing I knew, Bill sent me an e-mail with a link to a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank online “because you clearly missed going to the theatre.”

I hadn’t heard about this production, described as “a special presentation created by artists in isolation,” but Bill reported, “This is supposed to be spectacular.”  So I began watching Anne Frank on Wednesday afternoon, 13 May.  It wasn’t what I expected (based, of course, on my vast experience with online performances, which now numbers three).

The background to this event is that the company, the Park Square Theatre, is in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the play was going to be presented on stage in a traditional production for audiences of over 12,000 middle and high school students (scheduled for 19-22 May). 

In other words, this Diary of Anne Frank wasn’t conceived as an online production.  (Park Square presented Anne Frank before, almost annually since the early 2000s; this was to have been its 21st staging.  Several members of this cast had been with the Park Square production for as much as 10 and even 20 years.)

The coronavirus pandemic scuttled those plans, but instead of abandoning the production, Ellen Fenster, the director, reimagined it with the technical assistance of Aaron Fiskradatz, a Twin Cities theater artist and “Zoom technologist.”  The cast had already been rehearsing their lines on Zoom, so the company simply transferred the entire show to the ’Net.

When it became clear that there was no way to assemble to record the staged version of The Diary of Anne Frank, the cast began rehearsing and recording a Zoom presentation of the play.  It was released on 21 April, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and originally scheduled to cease streaming on 15 May; it was extended to 24 May because of the response.

There were two ways a viewer could watch the performance.  The video’s divided up into either two acts of five scenes each or 10 individual scenes.  I chose to watch The Diary of Anne Frank scene-by-scene because it was easier to make notes or check details between scenes that way and to cease my viewing session when I needed to.  Either way, the whole video performance is a little over two hours long.

When I was looking on the ’Net for information about this production, I found that Terry Teachout reviewed Park Square’s online performance in the Wall Street Journal.  It occurred to me that Park Square got something of a lagniappe from this happenstance: 

People all over the country—and beyond—got to see the work of this vibrant regional company and they even snared a review in a prestigious national paper, something they would surely not have gotten in Saint Paul. 

Teachout, in fact, acknowledged that Park Square was a “troupe new to me” and proceeded to praise the cast and the production to a national and even international readership.  He even called C. Michael-jon Pease, Park Square’s executive director, and congratulated the troupe, telling Pease: “You’ve got one hell of a company of artists.”

I won’t recount the plot of Anne Frank; I presume most readers are familiar with the 1955 play or the 1959 film adaptation.  (Those who aren’t can easily look the play up in Wikipedia or the movie, which has the same plot, on either IMDb or Wikipedia.)  Both are adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from the book The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. 

Like the diary, the play is an account of the lives of the Frank and Van Daan families and Mr. Dussel, Jews of Amsterdam, Holland, after they went into hiding in an attic above Otto Frank’s former business premises from July 1942 until their discovery and arrest by the Nazi Green Police in August 1944.

(In her diary, which the budding writer revised and edited in May 1944 for potential publication, Anne made changes from her original version, written strictly for herself.  Among other alterations, the diarist had given some characters pseudonyms and the play—and my account here—follows the diary. 

(The real names and histories of the Van Daans, Mr. Dussel, and Mr. Kraler are known, but they play no role in the conception and performance of the play.  Curious readers can easily look them up.)

The Franks were German Jews and after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor (prime minister) of Germany in 1933, they fled to Amsterdam where Otto had been invited to manage a branch of the company for which he worked.  Then the German army occupied the Netherlands in May 1940 and the Franks were trapped. 

When the Gestapo and the Green Police—so called because of the color of their uniforms, this was the Nazi force with the task of policing the civilian populations of the German-occupied countries—started rounding up Dutch Jews, Otto Frank (portrayed in the Park Square production by Michael Paul Levin) prepared the three-story attic as a hide-away.  

The door to the stairway up to the attic—known as the Secret Annex in the Dutch edition of Anne’s diary—was disguised as a bookcase; it was only opened after all the workers of the company had left the building.  On 6 July 1942, Frank; his wife, Edith (Laurie Flanigan Hegge); and their daughters, 16-year-old Margot (Eva Gemlo) and 13-tear-old Anne (Sulia Rose Altenberg), moved into the hiding place. 

The Franks were accompanied by another Jewish family, the Van Daans.  Hans Van Daan (Jon Andrew Hegge) was Otto Frank’s business associate; he came with his wife, Petronella (Julie Ann Nevill), and their son Peter (Ryan London Levin), also 16.  Peter had brought his cat, Mouschi.  A few months later, the two families were joined by a dentist, Albert Dussel (Charles Fraser), who was in trouble and had no place to hide.

In the play, Otto Frank gives his youngest daughter a blank book when they arrive at the Secret Annex; in reality, he’d given it to her on her 13th birthday, 12 June 1942.  In either case, Anne began using it as a diary right away.  The famous book, which survived the war, was covered in red-and-white checkered fabric and had a little lock on the front.  (Poignantly, the diary Altenberg used in the performance matches this description.)

Since the office below the attic was still in operation during the day, the secret occupants above had to maintain strict silence and other restrictions.  Their needs were looked after by two trusted employees, Miep Gies (Sarah Broude) and Mr. Kraler (Jim Pounds). 

On 4 August 1944, the Green Police raided the attic and its occupants were arrested and taken away to various concentration camps.  Anne ended up in Bergen-Belsen with Margot and the woman represented in the play by Mrs. Van Daan.  Edith Frank died of starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945 at 44; Margot died of typhus at 19 in March 1945 at Bergen-Belsen and Anne died soon after at the age of 15.  The real-life Mrs. Van Daan died in mid-April 1945 either at Theresienstadt concentration camp or on the way there; she would have been 44.

Of the men, Mr. Van Daan was murdered in the gas chamber shortly after arriving at Auschwitz in early October 1944; the first of the eight Secret Annex occupants to die, he was 46.  Peter died of an unrecorded illness at Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945; he was 18.  The real-life dentist represented as Mr. Dussel in the play died at 55 in December 1944 in Neuengamme concentration camp of “enterocolitis,” a catch-all term that covered, among other things, dysentery and cholera. 

Only Otto Frank survived.  He ended up at Auschwitz where in January 1945, he was liberated by Soviet troops.  He returned to Amsterdam where Miep gave him his daughter’s diary, which she had saved from the remains of the group’s belongings in the ransacked hideout.  He edited it and in June 1947, the first Dutch edition of the diary was issued under the title Het Achterhuis (“The Secret Annex”).

The English translation was published in both the United States and the United Kingdom in 1952 and became a best seller.  The diary’s been published in over 70 languages, including German and Chinese, and is still one of the most widely read books in the world. 

In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition was published, restoring the entries which dealt with Anne’s feelings toward her family, her burgeoning womanhood, and her reflections on her Judaism and the Holocaust that Otto Frank and the original publishers had removed.

Otto Frank remarried in 1953 and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he had relatives.  In 1963, he established the Anne Frank Fonds (fund) in Basel to promote the global distribution and use of The Diary of a Young Girl.  When the city of Amsterdam issued a demolition order for the building in which the Franks and the real-life counterparts of the Van Daans and Mr. Dussel had hidden for over two years, Frank and another of Miep’s helpers in the protection of the hiders started the Anne Frank Foundation in 1957 to preserve the site.  The foundation purchased the building in 1960 and it now operates as a museum and memorial.

Otto Frank died of lung cancer on 19 August 1980 in Basel.  He was 91 and was survived by his second wife (who died in London in 1998 at 93) and his stepdaughter (now 81 and an active speaker on her family’s experiences during the Holocaust).  There are no longer any blood relations of Otto Frank left living.

Miep Gies was remarkably not arrested when the Green Police raided the Secret Annex.  She survived the war to greet Otto Frank when he came back to try to locate members of his family.  She lived on to 100 years of age, dying in 2010.  She received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as Israel’s Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations, awarded to honor non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide. 

Mr. Kraler in the play is also a stand-in for a real person.  He was arrested with the Franks and the others and used as forced labor in the Netherlands until March 1945.  Among a large group of prisoners being marched to Germany when an Allied bombing raid raised confusion, he took the chance to escape. 

Making it back to Holland by April, he hid out until the country was liberated by the Allies in May 1945.  Widowed in 1952, he remarried and emigrated to Canada.  He, too, was awarded the Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations and died at 89 in 1989 in Toronto.

The diary was adapted for the stage in 1955 by Goodrich (1890-1984) and Hackett (1900-95), opening at the Cort Theatre on Broadway on 5 October 1955.  Originally produced by Kermit Bloomgarden (1904-76) and directed by Garson Kanin (1912-99), The Diary of Anne Frank ran for 717 performances before it closed at the Ambassador Theatre (to which it had moved on 26 February 1957) on 22 June 1957.  It received the 1956 Tony Award for Best Play and four other nominations.  It also won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1956 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. 

Goodrich and Hackett adapted their play into a film script and in March 1959, Twentieth Century Fox released the movie version, produced and directed by George Stevens (1904-75).  In 1967, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) aired a TV movie based on the stage play and in 1980, 20th Century Fox Television made another television film for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC); both versions had star-studded casts.

A revision by playwright Wendy Kesselman (b. 1940) of the Goodrich and Hackett adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank was presented in October and November 1997 in Boston at the Colonial Theatre, directed by James Lapine (b. 1949).  It transferred to Broadway’s Music Box Theatre in December 1997, running for 221 regular performances and 15 previews.  The production was nominated for the 1998 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

In January 1987, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) ran a four-part TV miniseries based on The Diary of a Young Girl.  The BBC broadcast another adaptation of the diary in January 2009 in five half-hour episodes.  (It was aired on the Public Broadcasting Service [PBS] in the United States as part of its Masterpiece series in April 2010 as a single 100-minute broadcast.)

In 1968 Grigory Frid  (1915-2012) composed an operatic version of The Diary of Anne Frank.  The one-hour monodrama in 21 scenes for soprano and chamber orchestra was first performed at the All-Union House of Composers in Moscow in 1972.

Soon after the war, Meyer Levin (1905-81), a U.S. journalist serving as a war correspondent in Europe, read Anne Frank’s diary.  He’d been one of the first journalists to see the concentration camps as they were being liberated by the Allied forces and he was devastated by what he’d seen.  He couldn’t write about it—until he read Anne’s diary.  He actually wrote a dramatic adaptation of the book, but was beaten to the stage by Goodrich and Hackett.

He reconceived his play as a radio drama and on 18 September 1952, the eve of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), CBS radio broadcast Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.  (It was critically praised and the network rebroadcast it in November.)  On 14 September 2009, Jennifer Strome, who had rediscovered Levin’s radio script in 1999, produced a private, live performance of Levin’s radio play at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.  On 15 September 2012, Strome produced and directed a free on-demand podcast of the radio play to commemorate the 60th anniversary of its CBS broadcast in 1952.

The Diary of Anne Frank, in almost any of its forms, has become a perennial favorite among regional theaters, community groups, and college and high school drama programs.

First, let me say that the work by Park Square was excellent.  When I say it wasn’t what I expected, that’s not a criticism.  I was just surprised.

It wasn’t a full production in terms of staging.  There was no set or lighting; there were costumes and some props (both of which were scrounged from each actor’s home—though the costume bits all still looked period-correct).  There were even costume changes from scene to scene.

The actors, who all appeared from separate rooms in their homes, were seated.  (The video was recorded on Zoom, then edited and assembled—I’d guess by Fiskradatz.)  They each appeared in a box with a neutral background (each a different color) and there was no movement aside from hand or arm gestures and facial expressions.

It was halfway like a reading, except that the actors were wearing costumes and using some hand props—and the dialogue was memorized, not read from scripts.  Because there was no movement, the actors all read their stage directions, which was a little odd at first, since stage directions are written in third person.  Someone off camera read the general stage directions while the screen was black—which I found a little disconcerting because at first I thought maybe something was wrong with my computer or my connection.  (There wasn’t.)

As I noted, each actor was in a separate box and all the actors “on stage” were seen in gallery view.  As characters entered or exited, their boxes appeared or disappeared—and the other boxes rearranged themselves randomly.  Sometimes while a character was speaking and someone else entered or left, the box of the character talking popped into a new location.  I found this flustering because, while I could continue to hear the actor, it took me a second or two to find where the speaker reappeared.

There was only one instance when the actors left their boxes in view of the audience—that is, they didn’t turn off their cameras.  That was the final exit at the end of the play (“Our time here has come to an End,” act 2, scene 4), after the Germans raided the Secret Annex.  Each actor gathered her or his belongings and, starting with Mr. Frank, stood and walked out of the box in silence, one by one.  The empty boxes all remained until only Anne was left on screen. 

                                                              

Anne took out the red-and-white checked diary; the screen zoomed in on her box alone as she wrote her final entry, detailing the departure.  Then the screen returned to the view of Anne and the seven empty boxes as she gathered her things and exited.  The screen went black. 

A local reviewer—who’d previously seen a full production of Park Square’s Anne Frank—reported of this moment: “The last scenes of the play, watching each face as the reality of what is happening dawns, are even more gripping and dramatic than the stage version.”

It was one of the times in the presentation when the actors used the boxes as if they were not only their set, but their world.  Instead of looking toward the door on the stage set that would have been the entry point of the Green Police, they all looked around the perimeters of the their boxes, as if they were expecting the Germans to penetrate the virtual frames.

According to actor Ryan London Levin, this was the result of director Fenster’s guidance.  She had told her actors to imagine that their Zoom boxes were, indeed, their worlds—the way actors are often trained to see their stage environment.  When they heard a thief downstairs from the attic after working hours, they were directed to respond as if he might break into their boxes. 

Despite the small issue of not always finding the on-screen speaker, however, I found myself perhaps more engaged in the online performance than I sometimes have been at in-person shows.  As I reported in the article on online theater, there were reasons for this.

                                                                                            

Because the actors appeared in close-up one-shots, each in a separate window, there was little doubt most of the time who was speaking.  If the actor used facial expressions, I could see them very clearly.  Further, the actors all looked as if they were performing for me—as if I were the only spectator.  (In a live-theater performance I attended where that was literally true, I was very self-conscious.)  That made it hard to look away, even though I knew they couldn’t see me.

Not that there weren’t some technical glitches.  The audio and the visual images were out of synch occasionally; an actor’s speech sometimes didn’t match her or his lip movements.  The sound sometimes dropped out and the video froze once or twice. 

Since this is a Saint Paul company, I don’t know any of the artists—actors, director, or desigers.  According to the program—there’s a PDF of the original one intended for the stage performances—some of the actors are Equity members and some are not.  I’d say the production is the equivalent of a very good Off-Off-Broadway performance, maybe a baby Off-Broadway one.

The acting, which was close to readers’ theater, was quite good.  I’m pretty sure Sulia Rose Altenberg is several years older than Anne (for one thing, Altenberg’s played the role for a few years at Park Square), but she captures the 13-year-old’s childishness, her inquisitiveness, her precocity, her sense of humor convincingly.  Ryan London Levin personifies the diffidence and sensitivity of the teenager that’s Peter.

If I had to imagine an Otto Frank, I couldn’t have done better than Michael Paul Levin.  He was entirely convincing in his efforts as de facto pater familias to keep everyone in the attic on an even keel despite the horror of their situation, while at the same time his tenderness with Anne as she goes through not only the adjustment to their straits, but her transition from a little girl to a young woman. 

A note about the performance of Levin’s Otto: he used a pronounced German accent, while the Dutch characters spoke ordinary American English.  Laurie Flanigan Hegge’s Edith Frank also had a slight German accent (the vocal coach was Keely Wolter) and the two Frank adults both handled this credibly. We remember that the Franks were recent refugees from Germany whereas the other characters were either native-born Dutch or had been in the Netherlands for a long time. 

I assume the rationale for the Frank daughters not to have German accents is that they both came to Amsterdam as little children in 1933—Anne was four and Margot was seven—and had been going to Dutch schools.  I thought this was an excellent decision on the part of Fenster and well executed by the cast.

All the cast handled what could have become a collection of clichés behaving predictably gently and with heartfelt conviction.  Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan could have been played as one-note selfish, spoiled, and egotistical social-climbers, but Jon Andrew Hegge and Julie Ann Nevill found the sympathetic aspect of the characters despite their often cold behavior.

I was much impressed with some of the physicalizations the actors accomplished in spite of the restrictive environment of the online production.  They managed to make the few gestures they did seem coordinated with one another—as one actor reached out to hand some object to another, the second actor appeared to take it—even though the props themselves were different objects.

One remarkable example was a tug-o’-war Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan have with the woman’s beloved fur coat (“A New Year,” act 2, scene 1): Hegge and Nevill were each in his and her own Zoom box—but it really looked like they were pulling at opposite ends of the garment.

Part of this might have been the conviction by the actors that the few objects they used as props, as directed by Fenster, had been selected by the actors very carefully.  Ryan London Levin explained that the director had suggested they “find objects in our house to use as props . . . that are special for you.” 

Another accomplishment that touched me was the way the cast handled the Jewish customs in the play.  The main one is the celebration of Hanukkah (“Hanukkah in the Attic.” act 1, scene 5), with the lighting of the candles and Anne’s handing out small hand-made gifts, and then her singing “Oh, Hanukkah.” 

I have no idea how many of the cast are Jewish, but surely not all of them—yet they all made me feel like these were traditions they knew—except Charles Fraser’s Mr. Dussel, who’s character is clearly a secular Jew and doesn’t know his faith’s traditions, comparing Hanukkah to “Saint Nicholas Day.”  (The historical dentist was, in fact, a devout Jew.) 

Two other impressions: part of the hiders’ situation is very reminiscent of ours during the current pandemic—though far more dire, of course.  The theater’s own promotional material draws a parallel with “a country experiencing social isolation and anxiety about the future in unprecedented ways.”  The theater couldn’t have predicted this situation when they selected and scheduled Anne Frank (announced on 28 February 2020; Minnesota’s stay-at-home order didn’t take effect until 28 March), which is weird.  

I found watching this story emotionally hard.  I’m generally not good with Holocaust stories—I avoid movies on the subject—because it makes me really, really angry.  Knowing how this story ends—I read The Diary of a Young Girl when I was in middle school and I saw the 1959 film (which came out when I was 12)—makes it even harder.  This is not a play I’d have chosen to see in a theater.

The  Twin Cities reviewer in World magazine, a bi-weekly Christian news magazine published in Asheville, North Carolina, Sharon Dierberger, called the Park Square online production “the most creative and emotional rendition of The Diary of Anne Frank you may ever see.”  Dierberger observed that “Anne Frank’s hiding in the secret annex is particularly apropos considering the isolation today’s pandemic is causing around the world,” but admonished that “viewing it will leave you counting your blessings instead of your days without dining in a restaurant.”

The review-writer felt that “the personal nature of the players looking directly into the camera heightens the emotion of each line.”   She added:

The simplicity of the format and close-up expressions of each wonderfully well-cast actor are surprisingly effective.  I didn’t expect to be so drawn in, especially because I’d seen the actual play in the same theater years earlier.  That production was moving.  This was even better.

The Minnesota writer especially found that she “empathized with Anne’s adolescent ruminating and older-than-her-years philosophizing.”  She continued: “Sulia Rose Altenberg portrays Anne, and has found the right balance of innocence and angst.”

“Michael Paul Levin, playing Anne’s father, is believable as the patriarch trying to buoy up the attic occupants, maintain peace, love his family well, and remain ever-hopeful,” Dierberger wrote.  With respect to the whole ensemble, the World reviewer “could feel my own temperature rise watching family members struggle to get along in close quarters, share rations, and wait, wait, wait.”

The big PR coup for the Park Square Theatre was Terry Teachout’s Wall Street Journal review.  The WSJ reviewer labeled the theater’s production “the most stirring staging of ‘Anne Frank’ I have ever seen.”  He went on to elucidate that it was

a version that employs the unique properties of Zoom in a way that heightens the intrinsic drama of the play itself, subtly connecting the terrible truth of the Frank family’s desperate attempt to hide from the Nazis to the infinitely less consequential but still painful solitude in which so many of us find ourselves forced to live.

Teachout observed that the play “tells an emotionally overwhelming story with a simplicity that brings it within reach of just about any cast imaginable.”  Of the production, the WSJ review-writer reported: “It is acted by a very, very strong 10-person ensemble.” 

Further, he affirmed of “the play’s climax,” the scene of the hiders’ departure from the Secret Annex, “that Ms. Fenster and her ingenious colleagues have come up with what might well be the very first Zoom-based coup de théâtre, a scene of stunning intensity whose mere memory reduces me to tears as I write these words.”

“To watch Park Square’s ‘Anne Frank,’” declared Teachout, “is to be given an exciting preview of what Zoom will make possible for other theater companies who are capable of using it with comparable imagination.”  In conclusion, he added: “Rarely has a revival of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ been so timely.”