“In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart,” wrote a young Anne Frank, aware that her destiny would be deportation to a death camp if she and her Jewish family were discovered in their secret location, hiding from the Nazis.
Though 60 years have passed, the Holocaust remains viable subject matter for live theater. For the next two weekends, the U theater department invites audiences to investigate this event for themselves as they present “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the Babcock Theatre.
Directed by theater department chairman Bob Nelson, “Anne Frank” is unique to the world of drama in that it takes an artistic approach to a historic event characterized by violence and murder on a scale of terrifying magnitude.
In Nelson’s notes on the play, he acknowledges the challenge actors face is portraying characters guilty of genocide, as they must try “to understand and even justify state-mandated murder from a perpetrator’s viewpoint.”
In discussing methods of approaching the play, senior theatre studies major Zach Sudbury, who plays Anne’s father, Otto Frank, said of the Nazis, “They’re real people and we want to be true to that,” suggesting that no matter how evil characters might be, an actor cannot accurately and genuinely portray them while carrying judgment.
“We also talked about ‘why do it now?'” Sudbury said. “We like to think our society has matured, so why do the show?”
Nelson offers the response, “Millions more have been murdered since the Nazi Holocaust of World War II — in the name of civil war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, insurgency, counter-insurgency, tribal conflict and other such sanitized euphemisms.”
“There’s still genocide taking place in the world, like Darfur,” Sudbury said. “There’s still atrocities being committed, there’s still prejudice.”
“I think it’s important to see a show about where prejudice can take you and where that did take us, that it wasn’t just Hitler who did it — everyone let it happen,” Sudbury said.
Nelson wrote to audiences that he hopes “to spur us to acknowledge some terrifying truths…that the life of each human being is precious beyond words and that ‘civilized’ people are infinitely capable of objectifying one another and committing unspeakable evil.”
Sudbury said he is excited to see people emotionally affected by the “heart-wrenching” story and hopes people will push past the all too common notion that a play with depressing subject matter is not worthy of attending.
“I like a happy show as much as the next guy, but it’s important to remember (the Holocaust),” he said. “You can’t just think that everything’s happy in the world, because it’s not. You can only do something about it if you remember it.”