Anne Frank was a teenage girl. She wasn’t only a Jew or a writer or a victim of the Holocaust. Just like other teenage girls, she fought with her parents, she got crushes on boys, she studied hard.
When her family went into hiding in the Secret Annex, the 13-year-old wallpapered her small room with photos of her favorite movie stars.
Starting tonight, the teenage Anne comes to life in the Denver Center
Theatre Company’s production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” at The Space Theatre.
Using Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaptation of the original Pulitzer Prize-winning script, director Paul Mason Barnes and his cast aim to show life in the annex as realistically as possible.
“I think we do a disservice when we don’t treat people as fallible and flawed,” said Aya Cash, who plays Anne. “Anne’s struggling with her identity and her parents and her sexuality, and not always coming to the right decisions, not always making the perfect choices.
“Her striving in this environment is what is so beautiful about her.”
Barnes and his crew took pains to recreate the cramped quarters of the annex. The show is staged in the round with everything in view – a challenge Cash embraced.
“I’m so excited to do any show in the round because I feel like you can’t hide,” she said. “There’s always going to be someone. If you’re not getting somewhere emotionally, you can’t turn your head and gather it up and turn around. It takes away our tricks.”
Stairs leading under the stage serve as the only exit from the annex. The actors are exposed and uncomfortably confined, much like the occupants of the annex must have felt.
John Hutton, who plays Anne’s father, Otto, vividly remembers rehearsing a scene in which Mr. Frank goes down the annex stairs to investigate a commotion below.
“I remember the first time we did the break-in,” he said. “We’d been working slowly from the beginning of the play, and the first time I went downstairs I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’m out of the annex.’ I had a visceral feeling of being out of the annex for the first time.”
To underline the refugees’ isolation from everyday life, Barnes took a tip from Kesselman: When the lights go up for intermission, the actors will remain onstage, in character.
When the lights go down afterward, they’ll still be there.
“The impact of it is pretty amazing,” said Barnes, “because of the way in which our lives as audience members get to continue in their normal fashion, just as everybody else who was not a Jew hiding out in Amsterdam got to go on with their lives.”
The physical environment of the stage helps the actors channel their characters, but the cast also delved into World War II research to better understand life outside the annex.
They spoke with Eric Cahn, a local man who survived the Holocaust as a child by separating from his parents and hiding in France for two years. His mother died in Auschwitz.
Cahn eventually found his father, who sent him to America when he was 12 under the Displaced Persons Act. He settled in a Denver orphanage and graduated from North High School in 1956. He then went on to the University of Colorado, earned two degrees, married and has three children.
“(Eric led) almost a guided meditation on what it would be like to be living during the Holocaust,” recalled Cash. “Doing that was a beautiful way of explaining to us that it’s not history, it’s right here.”
Donald R. Seawell, chairman emeritus of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, also stopped by to tell his story to the cast.
A veteran of World War II, Seawell worked with General Eisenhower and helped plan the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
“To see these people in front of you, you can’t help but acknowledge them as real,” Cash said. “History can be very alienating because we don’t see those people as people who are like us. But we were able to really understand – these are people like you and me.”
“The Diary of Anne Frank”
Drama. Presented by Denver Center Theatre Company at The Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett; adapted by Wendy Kesselman. Through Dec. 15. 6:30 p.m.
Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $36-$46. 303-893-4100, 866-464-2626 (800-641-1222 outside Denver),
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