First they are there, teeming with life -- even if that life has become a terrible distortion of the real thing and clouded by ever larger intimations of death.
April 16, 2007 (Press Release) --
Then, in a flash, they are gone. And it is that sudden, gaping absence in the attic annex at 263 Prisengracht that is the most powerful moment in director Tina Landau's production of "The Diary of Anne Frank," which opened this weekend at Steppenwolf Theatre. Sure, news of the approaching liberation was being beamed over the radio airwaves in 1944. But it would come a few months too late for the eight Jews who for two years had hidden in this attic, forced to live like rats and kept alive only by the impossibly noble efforts of a self-effacing young Dutch woman, Miep Gies.
Landau (using Wendy Kesselman's 1995 version of the original Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett script), lets the audience gaze at the attic for a long while -- the rumpled bedclothes, furniture, suitcases and signs of former life trashed in the terrifying departure overseen by a trio of barking Nazi soldiers. In those silent moments, as the characters are loaded on trains in Amsterdam, Holland, and sent to concentration camps, you have plenty of time to reflect on the fullness of life that was there just seconds before (with the actors even "living" onstage during the intermission), and on the immense void that remains.
Of course, one precious document remains in the annex -- the carefully crafted diary of a smart, vivacious, experience-hungry teenage girl whose intensely personal chronicle captured the nightmare of that period. Its pages were, above all, a vivid record of human nature in extremity -- sometimes petty, sometimes generous, sometimes verging on madness, often remarkably disciplined.
It is, on some level, quite beside the point to quibble with a production of "Anne Frank." Like the massive memorial to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust I visited a couple of weeks ago in Berlin, it is essential viewing. That said, Landau's production is solid if something less than riveting. Steppenwolf's vast stage is about three times as wide as any Dutch town house, and a crucial sense of claustrophobia and lack of privacy are somewhat lost in designer Richard Hoover's wide-open set. There also are moments when the acting is a bit stiff and stagey.
But Landau has found a lovely and accomplished Anne in Claire Elizabeth Saxe, an Oak Park-River Forest High School senior with a luminous face and unaffected freshness and energy. Saxe has forged a fine bond with the understated Yasen Peyankov, who plays Otto, Anne's beloved father (whose recently uncovered letters, sent before the family went into hiding, painfuly detail his attempts to get visas to America or another safe haven).
Landau (using Wendy Kesselman's 1995 version of the original Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett script), lets the audience gaze at the attic for a long while -- the rumpled bedclothes, furniture, suitcases and signs of former life trashed in the terrifying departure overseen by a trio of barking Nazi soldiers. In those silent moments, as the characters are loaded on trains in Amsterdam, Holland, and sent to concentration camps, you have plenty of time to reflect on the fullness of life that was there just seconds before (with the actors even "living" onstage during the intermission), and on the immense void that remains.
Of course, one precious document remains in the annex -- the carefully crafted diary of a smart, vivacious, experience-hungry teenage girl whose intensely personal chronicle captured the nightmare of that period. Its pages were, above all, a vivid record of human nature in extremity -- sometimes petty, sometimes generous, sometimes verging on madness, often remarkably disciplined.
It is, on some level, quite beside the point to quibble with a production of "Anne Frank." Like the massive memorial to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust I visited a couple of weeks ago in Berlin, it is essential viewing. That said, Landau's production is solid if something less than riveting. Steppenwolf's vast stage is about three times as wide as any Dutch town house, and a crucial sense of claustrophobia and lack of privacy are somewhat lost in designer Richard Hoover's wide-open set. There also are moments when the acting is a bit stiff and stagey.
But Landau has found a lovely and accomplished Anne in Claire Elizabeth Saxe, an Oak Park-River Forest High School senior with a luminous face and unaffected freshness and energy. Saxe has forged a fine bond with the understated Yasen Peyankov, who plays Otto, Anne's beloved father (whose recently uncovered letters, sent before the family went into hiding, painfuly detail his attempts to get visas to America or another safe haven).
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