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The NS drama department has decided to portray “The Diary of Anne Frank” for this spring’s play.
Anne Frank is a well known Jewish girl from the Holocaust. Her family moved from Germany to the Netherlands to escape the rumors of war. Unable to emigrate to the US, Anne’s father Otto Frank takes his family to hide from the Nazi’s in the annex of his business firm. Otto’s family, a dentist and one other family all hide in the secret annex of the building.
“For most of the day they couldn’t talk, they couldn’t move, use the bathroom, anything. They couldn’t wear shoes up there,” said lead role Maralyn James. “It was very scary for them.”
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is one of the more serious plays that the drama department has put together.
“As far as our department goes, we have yet to do a drama,” said drama teacher Alex Barlow. “We’ve mostly done comedic stuff, and so I wanted to do a drama this year.”
Because the department doesn’t usually do more serious plays, it creates new challenges for the roles in the play.
“[Anne] has to hide her emotions all the time,” James said. “She’s actually hurting inside a lot because she is 13 and she’s still growing up.”
Much of the play consists of Anne writing her thoughts and feelings into her journal.
“I do scenes where she’s writing in her journal,” James said. “During those times she’s just very real. You know what she’s feeling.”
For the student actors to truly relate to their characters, they have to be able to use their emotions to connect to their role.
“There are challenges with dramatic acting,” Barlow said. “They actually have to be open and be vulnerable and actually feel emotion on the stage. It can be a terrifying thing for a high schooler to show emotion.”
This is made even harder in that a big part of the acting from the leading roles has to be is done silently.
“You have to show a lot of good relationships,” senior Emily Hill said. “There’s a lot of love that you have to show and there’s a lot of tension that you have to show without actual words.”
Because Anne Frank’s family lived nearly 90 years ago, it can be difficult for students to understand what she and her family were going through at that time.
“When you see the show you see that they’re just regular people,” Barlow said. “The mom and the daughter are just fighting with each other. Stuff that you would see in a normal family. I think that’s the reason that [the play] is so important.”
Although the play is sterner than plays that the high school has done in the past, there are things in the production that are happy.
“A lot of people do believe that it is a very sad and depressing play,” Hill said, “but really it’s not, and I think that they’re not expecting it to be good and because of that, they aren’t going to come. But it is a really entertaining, funny, fun play.”
The somber nature of play and the period of history it happened in, it is sometimes difficult for people to look back at the cruelty and the sadness, but has significance for us today.
“It’s a good reminder of history,” Barlow said. “Sometimes we have these things in history that we don’t want to talk about or think about but it’s important that we do to really remember these things that have happened so we can keep them from happening again.”
