In her diary, Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who went into hiding with her family in the Netherlands to escape the Nazis, wrote of her dream to act on the stage.
The Mineola High School Thespian Troupe will bring her to life on the stage when it performs “The Diary of Anne Frank” this weekend.
The production is the unedited version of Anne Frank’s diary, which reveals her feelings about coming of age as a young woman and the resentments she held against her mother. Frank’s family’s hiding place was later discovered, and she died in the Bergen-Belsen death camp shortly before it was liberated near the end of World War II.
Mineola Middle School teacher Matt DeLuca said he chose the drama because it requires a 10-person cast and maximizes the opportunities for the young high school actors to gain stage experience.
But, he said, the play also conveys a “timeless message” and part of his mission is to make his actors aware of the many purposes theater serves.
“One is to remember our past and to learn from it,” DeLuca said.
Mineola High School junior Kate Barnwell, who plays Anne Frank, was familiar with her diary and has also read the diary of a Holocaust survivor in preparing for the part.
“Anne has always been somebody I admired. I knew her story and I thought it was really inspirational,” Barnwell said. “Looking into who she was as a person, it makes me a better person because she was so optimistic in such a tragic situation.
Senior Eric Timlin, who plays Peter, Anne’s boyfriend in their hiding place, said he has visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The experience changed his perspective about the scale of human suffering during that time from one of contemplating statistics to thinking about the individuals who owned the innumerable shoes piled in one of the museum’s exhibits.
“I try to imagine myself in their shoes,” Timlin said.
For senior Tom Mullane, the experience of acting the part of Anne’s father, Otto, in the play is distinctly different from working behind the scenes doing lighting, as he has been doing for school productions since sixth grade.
Like the other actors in the cast, he has done research about the Holocaust to gain a sense of the fear the characters in “Anne Frank” lived under.
Mullane said he is guided by the basic nature of the character he’s portraying.
“It’s definitely like nothing I’ve ever done before,” Mullane said. “The character in the show is very optimistic. I just stay that way.”
For junior Rebecca Bastos, who has had experience in two other high school productions, the experience of portraying Anne’s mother is a new one because the experience of the characters is so far beyond any that the actors have had in their own lives.
“It kind of goes out of your comfort zone because you’re playing real people who had a tragic thing happen to them. It’s hard, but its rewarding to know that you’re honoring these people,” Bastos said.
DeLuca said he chose to use the script based on the unedited version of Anne Frank’s diary – which featured Natalie Portman in the title role in its first rendition several years ago – because it provides a more complete representation of the Anne Frank.
He said he encourages his actors to “dig into” their scripts.
“This year in particular, we felt a great responsibility to treat these people with respect because they were real people,” DeLuca said.
In an atmosphere of darkness, DeLuca said the cast seeks to convey a message about perseverance and survival in the face of oppression.
That’s most emphatically conveyed in a voice over in Anne’s words that concludes the play, as she says that in spite of everything, she still believes that people are truly good at heart.
DeLuca is aided in his efforts to oversee the production by assistant director Bette Sloane, a mathematics teacher at Mineola High School.
The curtain goes up in the Mineola High School Theater at the high school in Garden City Park on Friday, Nov. 30 and Saturday, Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. A 2 p.m. matinee will also be performed on Saturday.
Tickets can be purchased for $9 in advance by calling 237-2625 or are available at the door for $10. All the proceeds go to a college theater scholarship fund maintained by the Mineola School District.
