Anne Frank and Me

Anne Frank and Me arrived with implications of a playful, educational and family-friendly undertone during its first act. The interactive play capped the quiet mumble of the crowd with a staccato of action between heroine Nicole and her younger sister in the midst of a sibling kerfuffle, the type of emotionally-heightened altercation with which parents of multiple teenagers are doubtless well-acquainted.
I was skeptical at first, because the roles of the characters seemed too exaggerated, too brazen, to really allow for an atmosphere that catered to anyone outside of the high school age bracket. It provided the illusion of simplicity with the manor in which it approached the subject of WWII. But the essence of flippancy quickly unraveled when the curtain rose on the second act.
The tone of the play shifts dramatically from the initial banality of adolescent quandaries to a somber, palpable apprehension that permeates the stage, and suddenly we find that Nicole is forced to suppress her bubbly, candid habits in favor of an adult sensibility that is necessary to navigate her new environment: a tangent universe set in the Paris of 1942.
The grim atmosphere is immediately discernible, and hangs on every breath and gesture of the characters to the point where the belly of every exchange, though underpinned by a steadily maintained burble of hope, seems almost serrated, as if the delivery of every line is unbearable- a vocalized admission of the largely unaddressed hardship faced by every character.
I briefly considered visiting the Holocaust museum during these ten days of ArtsFest, but I decided against it, in large because I could not bring myself to deliver a pithy, diluted summary about a memorial for arguably the most horrific event in the history of the industrialized world. When I attended Anne Frank and Me, I did not enter the theater with the expectation of departing the performance with tears in my eyes, and I was taken aback by the level at which it affected me. But what Anne Frank and Me delivers is a sincere approach to an indescribably heinous period in time, and compacts the subject into a performance art piece that is capable of recapitulating the tragedy of The Holocaust in the way that no assortment of written words could, or should, ever match. Because when we see the pains of humans transcend time and solidify into a form of art- whether it be painting, sculpting, dance or theater- we find that it is possible to examine a commonality of mankind with earnestness, without compromising the nature of the subject matter, while concurrently emboldening the statement with an element of humanity that no other human construct is able to exemplify.