Home / PRESS ROOM / SEASON ARCHIVES / THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK / DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Finding our way back to The Girl Who Talked Too Much (and Wrote So Beautifully)      

by Janet Allen, Indiana Repertory Theatre Artistic Director, and director of The Diary of Anne Frank

Biography has played a large role in theatre throughout its development. The very earliest preserved theatre texts are filled with the human desire to burrow in under the surface of famous characters and experience them not just as heroes, but as humans, with flaws and yearnings and even petty foibles. It’s the flaws that cause us to identify with fame, and to deepen our appreciation of the hero’s ultimate—if unwitting—role in history. Theatre is all about those human failings and conflicts. What makes The Diary of Anne Frank a staple of stages around the world is our desire to get a glimpse of the girl, not the legend—to experience the life, not just the myth.

It’s not at all surprising that the Anne Frank story has been a very popular one for dramatization and film-making. In addition to the two stage versions and the five film and TV versions, in recent years there has also been a Spanish-language musical created about her, supported by the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank Foundation—all in the name of introducing Anne’s story to new audiences. That’s a lot of dramatization activity in 60 years, as well as a worthwhile enterprise. Here at the IRT we have participated in this same thinking repeatedly. In addition to a 1984 production of the first Anne Frank stage script, we have twice (1996 and 2005) staged our playwright-in-residence James Still’s dramatization of Anne’s childhood friends’ stories—And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank—proving that even stories about those near to Anne Frank can deftly capture our imaginations. Why?

While I have no intention of bursting anyone’s bubble, it’s not all about the fame part, but also the hiding part. The conflicts inherent in the hiding create ripe opportunities for drama, because it’s all about conflict—and conflict is the engine of drama. And then when you add the ethical layer of why they were hiding and the danger of it—with its cultural, religious, political, and historic contexts—it makes for a very deep experience that has different kinds of meaning for people at different points in their lives. What is important to avoid is any sense that re-experiencing the dramatized events of Anne’s life gives us a kind of cultural absolution. Quite the contrary. Experiencing the play needs to lead us into continued discussions of the horrors of all manifestations of human hatred.

I don’t mean to sound cynical, as if Anne’s life existed to create drama—far from it. But what has given me perspective and, in fact, the courage to encounter Anne’s life with actors, has been the discovery of how much we can identify with Anne’s life in hiding, how much her yearnings, her mercurial nature, her angers, her jealousies, her misunderstandings, her loneliness, her self-absorption mirror the feelings of my own daughters and the daughters of my friends. How ironic that Anne has become a hero, for she was innately anti-heroic in so many ways. Yes, she was smart; yes, she was precociously talented as a writer; but mostly she was a kid—in fact, a smart-mouthed, impertinent, divisive kid who had a huge need to be recognized and praised and little awareness of the cost of those needs to those she was in hiding with.

These are the attributes that fuel dramatic exploration, because in every minute onstage we, as viewers, bump right up against our need to glorify her based on her fate, as well as the reality that she and the others she was in hiding with didn’t know that fate and, consequently, didn’t treat her accordingly. She was simply the irritating (if beguiling) youngest member of a gang of eight people who existed in too small a space, under too much pressure, for a much longer period of time than any of them could have imagined. She was not the girl of the famous Diary; she was the girl whose voluminous diary—in all its many precious and infuriating books and loose pages—must constantly have been in everybody’s way.

What would Anne Frank have thought of the considerable fame attached now to her story? This is a question that keeps coming back to me. Part of the answer is clear: like many a film-crazed, extroverted young teenager, she was transfixed by imagining her own famous future: “I’m going to be remarkable. I’m going to Paris. You’ll see. I’m going to be a famous writer or singer or dancer one day!” With words like those, it’s easy to imagine her longing to be the European equivalent of an American Idol contestant. And there’s no question that she had grandiose ideas about changing the world: “I want to be useful and bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living, even after my death.” What a blogger Anne might have been!

But the weight of the heroism that has been attached to her in the last 65 years might have proven an overwhelming burden for one particular reason: she didn’t set out to become a martyr. This is where looking backwards at a life cut short by death changes our perspective: we begin to see everything through the lens of that untimely and tragic death, and we lose the ability to look at the choices and moments leading up to that death on their own merit (or their own simplicity and commonness). So Anne, like Joan of Arc, or Ryan White, or any number of other children made martyrs by our cultural need for them, are forever defined by the circumstances of their deaths, not the lives they lived, or the faults, or the simple gifts—and daily challenges—they were to their friends and families.

And this is where theatre is a particularly useful tool: we get a chance to try to imagine what the life lived was like. We get a chance to bring Anne to life, carbuncles and all (and she had a lot of them!). Part of the beauty of that process is the chance to explore what is both heroic and anti-heroic in any life, and to consider how the anti-heroic features deepen our understanding of her ironic legacy.