DOCUDRAMA OF REFUGEE EXPERIENCE

In this celebratory year honoring the 100th birthday of our country’s symbol of freedom, the immigrant background most Americans share has taken hold of the national consciousness.

At Hollywood High School on Sunday, the Ensemble Studio Theatre presented its exploration of the issue with “My Name Could Be Anne,” an earnest, uneven docudrama written and directed by Nanci Rossov.

The play, inspired by the Anne Frank story, deals with the effect of war and persecution on children around the world. Based on stories Rossov gathered from local refugee communities, and presented in conjunction with the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust, the production is a collage of tragic statistics and testimonial accounts of horror.

Starkly staged, the play opens with a group of children, mostly teen-agers, emerging with cries of pain and terror from an amorphous ragged mound at center stage. (Ray Finnell designed the effectively bleak set.)

A few are related; most come from different countries. Each has suffered horribly and struggled to reach freedom. But the freedom they expected to find is not this desolate place of ruins.

Confused and distrustful, they eventually discover that they’re not only refugees from other places--Haiti, El Salvador, Africa, France, Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Cambodia and Armenia--but other times as well, from the turn-of-the century to the present.

They survive only in the memories of the living.

There are no words minced here. We hear of torture and rape, starvation and loss, but the play never achieves the visceral depth it strives for. It’s undone by a self-conscious awareness of its tragic subject that keeps the audience at a distance.

The accomplished cast of young people gave undeniably impassioned performances. Accents, some natural, were securely in place. But this is less a play than a series of speeches and exposition.

The dialogue shifted from actor to actor, sometimes choppily. When the characters urged each other to tell his or her story, the lights suddenly went down, spotlighting the speaker. (Marianne Schneller’s up-and-down lighting contributed a distracting air of melodrama.)

A superfluous and sketchy love interest between the young African man from the present and the young Russian Jewish girl from the past was an excuse to throw in a brief demonstration of racial prejudice, quickly over.

The play’s most effective moment was when it dropped the pretense of story and became purely a talk piece. The actors lined up facing the audience, calling out statistics, slowly at first then faster, overlapping one another: “200,000 boat people--one half under the age of 14, died”; “in 1981, 13,000 people were killed or disappeared in El Salvador”; “5 million have fled Afghanistan since 1982, the world’s largest refugee population. . . .”

The cold numbers engaged the emotions, where the too-calculated attempt at personalizing them did not. The jolting record of global victimization is something to think about as Liberty Weekend approaches.