A powerful and wrenching 'Anne Frank' at Bay Street

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Elizabeth Oldak, as Anne Frank, enjoying a moment of fun while listening to life through the floorboards of her attic hideout.
Photos by Gary Mamay

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The organizers of the Bay Street Theatre Literature Live! education program have chosen well for their inaugural production. “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the powerful and wrenching dramatization of the contents of Anne Frank’s diary by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is a brilliantly gripping and passionate bringing to life of a work of literature that in itself captures, with touching eloquence, the effect upon innocent people of the horror of the Nazi Final Solution.

Bay Street, as always, has mounted an impressive, quality production of the play. Murphy Davis directs a solid professional cast in a compressed, intermissionless, 90-minute production of the famous play, which, though it sometimes, in its form, offers some necessarily abrupt emotional changes and plot developments, nevertheless gives audiences a full and telling emotional involvement in the unfolding of a terrible true story.

This is no Cliff Notes version of the play; it’s an involving and ultimately shattering theatrical experience, and its very compression makes it just right for young audiences who are used to things happening rapidly. And at the conclusion of each performance, a fascinating and moving conversation between Mr. Murphy, the audience and warmly articulate Holocaust survivor Werner Reich amplifies and underscores the performance that precedes it.

Gary Hygom has designed a multi-level, brooding set that captures the confinement and Spartan spareness of the hideout from the Nazis that two Jewish families and a single Jewish dentist survived heroically for more time than it would seem human beings could endure. A visit to the actual annex—preserved now as a memorial, with its stairway hidden behind a bookcase in an Amsterdam factory—reveals how cruelly cramped these quarters really were. Stephen Winkler’s embracing lighting design completes and complements the mood of the setting.

The narrative from Anne’s diary binds the various scenes together, moves the time frame, and inserts the contrasting, outside unfolding of the war that gives the annex dwellers various experiences of hope and despair. While this account is customarily delivered in a voice-over that covers scene changes, at Bay Street it’s presented live by Anne in the process of writing her diary, and this effectively personalizes these passages.

The performances of the cast are uniformly elevated and elevating. If some of the deliveries at the beginning of the production’s run seemed a bit more declamatory than passionate, they will undoubtedly deepen along with the accumulation of performances.

Ken Forman’s Mr. Frank is a bit more businesslike than Joseph Schildkraut’s more gentle approach in the original Broadway production, but it’s no less strong and impressive and ultimately impassioned. And Lynn Taylor’s’ realization of the sometimes embattled Mrs. Frank is heartfelt and touching.

Elizabeth Oldak’s Anne Frank is riveting, painting with wise and feeling skill a portrait of a precocious and spirited child whose spirit and experience transform her into an eloquent and poignantly passionate adolescent. The battling Van Daans are nicely realized by Sandra Powers and Darren Kelly. And Joanna Howard delivers a memorable and telling incarnation of Anne’s older sister, Margot. It’s a masterful lining out and sustaining of a suddenly isolated, sensitive young woman who is wracked by constant, controlled pain.

There are probably no more shattering moments than the concluding ones of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” And as profoundly realized in this production, they are emotionally rending for players and audiences alike, and thus will undoubtedly bring to personal, passionate life a work of literature for all the student theatergoers, as well as members of the public both young and old.