Class-conscious drama

'Anne Frank' aimed at a middle-school audience, families

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Terry Shapiro

Aya Cash plays Anne Frank, the Jewish teen from Amsterdam whose diary was published after her death in 1945 in a concentration camp.

Cynthia Schlessinger has been teaching The Diary of Anne Frank for 15 years.

But that's a drop in the bucket for a book that has become a curriculum staple in the 60 years since Otto Frank published 1,500 copies of his daughter's diary in Amsterdam.

And while it may seem dully familiar to some, the story of the young teen who hid from the Nazis in an attic for two years before dying in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is a revelation for each new class.

"The first year I taught we read the play, and the question that continually came up was, 'So why didn't she just leave? What was her problem? What kept her there?' " says Schlessinger, a language arts teacher at Century Middle School in Thornton. "They had no understanding whatsoever about the Holocaust."

When the play opens tonight at Denver Center Theatre Company, it will usher in a new initiative, including middle-school students in the theater's offerings. The decision was a personal one for artistic director Kent Thompson.

"Having watched my son through his middle-school years, it's the first time they are dealing with issues of history, social responsibility, ethics, the choices that are made in the world politically, and how they affect people. They look at prejudice and persecution, immigration," Thompson says.

"I thought, that's a really interesting time frame for theater. It's the last time students could come with their families easily to the theater, because high school seems to be unbelievably busy, and also I don't know that they want to hang out with their parents."

To make The Diary of Anne Frank even more accessible, Denver Center initiated lower ticket prices for this production. Prices range from $10 to $35, rather than the usual cost of $31 to $48 for a show. The play also will have more matinees than usual to accommodate school groups.

In order to lower the prices, Denver Center has raised nearly $200,000 for the production. The company also is collaborating with the Mizel Center for the Arts for an exhibition featuring photographs of child survivors of the Holocaust.

"I think what we're trying to do in all the materials that we're creating is trying to make it specific to kids today," Thompson says.

"If you had to go into this size of a place, what would you take today? For me, Anne Frank from her writings is such a living, breathing character, she makes it impossible to deny that these events have happened."

The Denver Center production is not the familiar script from film and theater, but an adaptation by Wendy Kesselman that ran on Broadway with Natalie Portman in 1997-98. In part, it restores the religious observance to the Jewish family.

"I think the script being written when it was was a little, it wasn't sanitized, but they didn't press the Jewishness of the family and their religious conviction," Thompson says.

"Most importantly, it's a little less sentimental. The famous line that we have, 'I still believe that people are good,' is really taken out of context (in the original), and the device of the father finding the diaries was kind of a theatrical device from the mid-century."

Moreover, Kesselman delivers a more honest version of Frank, Thompson believes.

"She made the girl human, made her a real teenager - which I believe makes her talent incredible, and it makes the losses incredible," Thompson says.

"There were things that Otto Frank pulled out of the diary that have since been published which made her more temperamental at times, and wondering about her sexuality, and her sexual awakening. And I think the end is more sobering, because you really realize what a brilliant writer she was, and you also realize how incredibly claustrophobic this experience was."

The value of The Diary of Anne Frank is more than historical: It serves as a literary tool as well.

"We're going to talk about the difference between the actual diary that we read in book form and how it was adapted to a drama, and how Wendy Kesselman updated it to be a more accessible piece of dramatic literature," says Donna Frazer, an English teacher at Lakewood High School, which is sending 300 students to the play.

"I've seen Death of a Salesman four or five times onstage and it always is different for me the way it is interpreted. One of the lessons we're teaching here is when we go from one medium to another, the story can have a different impact on the audience."

For Schlessinger, the book and play help teach diaries as a form of literature.

"It is Anne Frank's language. It's her word choice, it's her way of thinking in that confined environment, and, in the end, how she changed the lives of the world through her story," Schlessinger says.

"The format, I think, helps them understand how their own thoughts and their interpretations of life can influence others and can change the way that others think."

The Diary of Anne Frank

*When and where: 6:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Saturdays (many Monday, Tuesday and Thursday performances have been moved to accommodate student matinees)o through Dec. 15, Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street

*Cost: $10 to $35

*Information: 303-893-4100 or denvercenter.org