It’s an iconic face, a story everyone learned in school. You see her visage and want to cry. But different eras have staged the story of Anne Frank differently.
The husband and wife writing team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett crafted their stage adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in 1956, just 11 years after Anne’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Over the years, as the play became a major mainstream popular success, critics began to carp about the sentimentalized, melodramatic and whitewashed nature of the adaptation, which prized a sense of universal victimhood over specific cultural identity.
This was a fair judgment, since Goodrich and Hackett had consciously mainstreamed an earlier, unproduced stage treatment of the play by Meyer Levin that had been deemed “too Jewish.” (That story has been told in a whole other play, “Compulsion” by Rinne Groff, which the Yale Rep premiered in 2010.) For a Broadway revival in 1997, modern playwright Wendy Kesselman (“My Sister in This House”) was enlisted to adapt the adaptation, heightening the social, historical and religious elements of this tragic tale.
Playhouse on Park in West Hartford embraces the Kesselman amendments to “The Diary of Anne Frank,” while letting the Goodrich/Hackett original breathe through. There’s harsh realism here, but also a comfortable family drama about childhood, parenting, sibling rivalry, first love and perseverance.
The play begins with the Frank family (Otto, Edith and their daughters Anne and Margot) and their friends the Van Daans (including son Peter, three years older than Anne) being shown the office building annex in Amsterdam where they will be waiting out the rest of World War II now that Germany has invaded Holland. At Playhouse on Park, the cramped lodgings are actually quite large — small for the seven (later eight) people who must share it, but filling the theater’s full square stage area. There’s plenty of room for the actors to move around, interact and be seen alone with their thoughts while others are at the center of a scene.
Ezra Barnes’ direction plays up the languor and listlessness of the family’s captivity. The actors seldom leave the stage, not even during intermission. (The bathroom door is their only escape to backstage.) We see them change their clothes in the dark, an acknowledgment of how many scenes in the show are set at nighttime. Much of that downtime is soundtracked with montages of Nazi radio transmissions, sirens, shouting soldiers and other nightmarish noises of the time.
There are a couple of out-of-character moments, as when the household’s most precious commodity, food, is thrown in anger. The actors are also show in wildly varying degrees of physical strain as the show winds on.
Some of the inconsistencies, though, have their advantages. The wan, fretful Edith Frank (Joni Weisfeld) is shown in stark contrast to her ebullient-in-the-face-of-adversity husband Otto (Frank Van Putten). Moments of lightness are in short supply, so Allen Lewis Rickman’s snappy patter as Mr. Van Daan and Jonathan Mesisca’s arsenal of nervous tics as Mr. Düssel can be a relief. The humor comes naturally out of the characters. Some of the big set pieces we associate with the play — Anne’s giddiness after her first kiss, for instance — aren’t played quite so grandly in this production.
Most of the brightness of course comes from the show’s believe-in-people heroine. Isabelle Barbier has an eerie resemblance to the few extant photos of the real Anne Frank, but she doesn’t rely on this for her portrayal. She’s believable as a child, and also serves as a larger-than-life symbol of innocence and hope in a world of barbarity and injustice.
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK runs through Nov. 19 at 244 Park Road, West Hartford. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. 860-523-5900 and playhouseonpark.org.
