REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Her story still speaks
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Like so many a young teen, the girl fought with her mother, felt thoroughly misunderstood, developed a major crush on a boy a few years older.
But Anne Frank was not just any girl.
Because of her fate during the waning days of World War II, because her father wanted to share his daughter's vibrant spirit with the world, Anne's thoughts and hopes and heart -- revealed in secrets she confided only to the pages of her now-famous diary -- have inspired readers and theatergoers for nearly 60 years.
Published in 1947, turned into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play in 1956 and an Oscar-winning film in 1959, The Diary of Anne Frank continues to speak powerfully to generations born long after her tragic death in a German concentration camp.
Wendy Kesselman's 1997 adaptation of the well-known Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett play offers a richer, more complex portrait of the young Jewish girl who spent the last two years of her life hiding above an Amsterdam office annex with seven other people, delving more deeply into her awakening sexuality, her conflicts with her mother and her Jewishness. And it is that Anne Frank that GableStage is giving both its regular and student audiences through the end of May.
Jennifer Lehr, a college graduate with a kid's physique, brings a mature actor's intelligence and technique to the plum role of Anne. In the close quarters shared by the Franks, the Van Daan family and a dentist named Dussel (Rich Simone gets the grim confines of the makeshift hideaway just right), Lehr's Anne can be annoyingly chatty and self-dramatizing, hormonally volatile, a little girl with a big personality.
Ultimately, as any performer playing Anne Frank must, Lehr makes you adore this playful, hopeful girl. And that makes her fate -- described in terrible detail by her father Otto (Peter Haig), the only one of that hidden group to survive the war -- feel personally devastating.
As he did with last season's Carbonell Award-winning A Lesson Before Dying, a production also shared with thousands of Miami-Dade County students, director Joseph Adler brings out the best in a top-notch cast.
Haig's Otto is valiant, warm, reassuring. As Anne's mother Edith, Sally Levin is Otto's flip side, forever worried and negative. Jaime Libbert makes elder daughter Margot a more mature, subdued version of Anne -- but the sibling connection feels believable.
A blustering George Schiavone and preening Angie Radosh have fun playing the less sympathetic Van Daans. Marc Kirscher's Peter isn't dreamboat material -- he's nondescript, really -- but the fuel of Anne's adoring gaze finally gets his own little glow going.
Howard Elfman's Duessel is, as he should be, a neurotic mess. And as the two people who manage, for a time, to turn a hiding place into a safe haven, Kevin Reilley is a stalwart Mr. Kraler, Sharón Kremen a radiant Miep Gies.
History, which can seem so dry to adults and kids alike, isn't just a collection of dates and facts. It has a human face. As The Diary of Anne Frank -- revisiting the diary, the dreams and the death of a girl who lived long ago -- reminds us.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Anne Frank's famous diary a haunting tale onstage
By Bill Hirschman, Staff Writer
The triumph of GableStage's The Diary of Anne Frank is found in captured moments, like photos discovered while leafing through a long-stored album:
Eight family members and friends huddling in an attic around two flickering candles on their first Hanukkah in hiding from the Nazis.
The seemingly shallow Mrs. Van Daan salving her husband's ego after he faces his weakness in stealing the community's bread.
The nebbishy dentist Mr. Dussel relating in profound disbelief the images of Jews being ripped from their homes.
The freezing of all movement, the bleeding out of life itself at an unexpected creak on the stairs.
While the oft-told story drags and flattens several times in this production, and the actors often get caught acting, the cumulative effect of moments is simply shattering.
Wendy Kesselman's 1997 rewrite of the 1955 chestnut traces Anne's two years in hiding until her family was arrested and sent to the camps. Kesselman's iteration is even darker and more complex than its predecessor, reflecting the teenager's sexual awakening, her strained relationship with her mother, her Jewishness and her growing terror at the horror outside.
The intermissionless arc is a tightening noose and the new text does not cheat with the uplifting finale of the Eisenhower-era version. Anne's famed utterance that she still believes people are truly good at heart is a voiceover lost in the clatter as the Nazis crash in. Her father Otto's coda as the sole survivor is no elegy but a keening lament. This play is no longer about heroes; it is about victims.
These are flawed people in complex relationships, where the sandpaper of interaction scrapes everyone's psyche in a closed crucible. Each can be selfish and giving, bickering and supportive. But as with Our Town, this production celebrates the ordinary trappings of life -- a book, a hug, a homemade present -- as transitory and precious.
Rich Simone's garret set stretches across the stage with a maze of stairs, low hanging beams and dark corners, yet under Jeff Quinn's lighting it becomes a claustrophobic ghetto affording no privacy.
The supporting cast features some of the region's best actors, including Peter Haig as Anne's father, Angie Radosh as Van Daan, Howard Elfman as Dussel and Jaime Libbert as Anne's shell-shocked older sister.
And then there is Jennifer Lehr. Her incarnation of an immature 13-year-old who struggles through adolescence is quintessential naturalistic acting. Only the playbill betrays that Lehr is a college graduate now teaching school in Miami.
Her Anne morphs like quicksilver from thoughtless to thoughtful, from a child sprawling across the floor to a sensitive young woman comforting her mother, and back again. Her greatest accomplishment, helped no doubt by director Joe Adler, is that the irony-drenched lines about her dreams to be a writer ("I want to go on living even after my death") are delivered so artlessly, without clanging like clumsy dramatic devices.
For a few hours, Anne gets her wish.
Bill Hirschman can be reached at 954-356-4513 or bhirschman@sun-sentinel.com.
