Anne Frank comes to life onstage

Audience members attending Rutgers' Theatre Company's production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" next month will get a view into the life of a 13-year-old Jewish girl during the Holocaust. But for some of the cast and crew, the experience is much more real than that. Amy Saltz, the production director, described the experience of working on this play as amazing. She and the Mason Gross student-actors have really been saturated by the play - she described them as residing in Anne Frank's world - a world that is a frightening place to visit. Saltz said this past summer she took a trip to the secret annex in Amsterdam where Frank resided for two years. She was able to look out her window and see what she saw. "It is quite chilling and I think I will be forever haunted by what I saw and felt while I was there. I hope that the audience will experience some of what I experienced," Saltz said. During World War II, Frank and her family of eight spent two years in hiding within a secret annex above an office building in Amsterdam. Crammed within this annex, they were hiding from the Nazis - fearing being sent to concentration camps, where they might face death. But Frank does not only write about the devastating issues at hand in her diary - at the same time, she is also trying to cope with current issues that come with her age. She talks about the changes within her body as she goes through puberty, her fear and the boredom that comes from being isolated, as her life is being put on hold. Anne Frank, in a diary entry dated May 3, 1944, questions, "Why, oh, why, can't people live together peacefully? Why all this destruction?" "The question of how she, we or anyone finds the strength and courage to go on living, even to have a 'normal' life in extremely difficult circumstances, is one that challenges all of us at different times in our lives," Saltz said. "Sometimes it can be meaningful to see how others did it." This play, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett in 1955, is based on Frank's diary, published in 1947 in Dutch under the title "Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl." The diary was translated to English in 1952. It underwent a lot of attention in the media, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, and received front-page reviews. Dr. Jeffrey Shandler, a University professor teaching a first-year seminar within the Jewish Studies Department, said the diary has been called a powerful and essential book in reviews. It has since become one of the most widely read books on the planet, and is doubtless most widely read diary ever. It reveals a personal experience of an ordinary individual experiencing war, Shandler said. What is so unusual about this story is a young adolescent struggling with growing up in the 1940's wrote it. This girl is experiencing genocide in her community, a hate crime that has nothing to do with who she is, or whom she is growing into, Shandler said. This is the first time Saltz has directed the show and she intends to bring Frank's story alive for audiences. "Part of what I've considered to be my responsibility is to bring what was happening outside of the annex onto the stage," Saltz said. Saltz wants the audience to get a window into the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust and issues of genocide, intolerance, ethnic cleansing, hate crimes, crimes against humanity and war are still going on in present day. She wants the audience to be aware of what these issues can do to people, and what it could be like living in that atmosphere. The Holocaust was an example in history where atrocities became commonplace, Saltz said. Saltz said she is reminded of the famous statement: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is how she feels about the Holocaust and similar tragedies keep on occurring in this world. That is why Frank's story has come to be emblematic not only for the Holocaust but for other human rights concerns, she said. The only difference is people are starting to make sense of the event with their changing views, for the play spoke very much to American audiences in the mid 1950s, and the world has changed since then, Shandler said. Shandler said one of the more provocative imaginings of Frank appears in Philip Roth's novel "The Ghost Writer," in which the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, imagines Frank had survived the war and is exposed to the impact and influence she has had on the public, from this, she decides she is more valuable to the world dead than alive. "Roth does this in part, I think, to ask readers to think about what they have invested in Anne Frank as an important source of moral inspiration," Shandler said. "The Diary of Anne Frank" will run from Friday, Nov. 2 though Saturday, Nov. 17. The performances through Nov. 17 will be held at 8 p.m., and 10 a.m. on Nov. 13 and 15. Tickets will cost $15 for students, $20 for alumni and $25 for the general public. The New Theater is located on Douglass campus in the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center at 85 George St.