STAGE REVIEW : Lamb’s Players Do Poignant Job With ‘Diary of Anne Frank’

“It’s an odd idea for someone like me, to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I--nor for that matter anyone else--will be interested in the unbosomings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.” --From “The Diary of Anne Frank”

Anne Frank died in the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen two months before its liberation and three months before her 16th birthday.

She was just one of the 6 million Jews who died at Nazi hands during World War II. The simple diary she left--bursting with girlish confessions, complaints, laughter, tears, dreams and longings--gave the Holocaust a human face.

The diary begins just before Anne went into hiding with her family and four other Jews in a cramped attic in the Netherlands, and ends with the family’s discovery by the Nazis 2 1/2 years later. Anne’s father, Otto, was the only member of the family to survive the concentration camps.

Seeing the play, now at Lamb’s Players Theatre through Sept. 17, reopens the personal pain that lies buried under the statistics. The story is all the more poignant because Anne is mercilessly honest in describing the eight refugees in the cramped attic. She records the spats about whether or not she will eat her vegetables, her struggle with her lessons, the jokes, the joys, the challenge to come up with some kind of presents for each other on birthdays--such as sugar saved from Anne’s porridge used to make sweets for the others--and the moment when she first felt herself falling in love with Peter, the teen-age son of the other couple hiding with her parents.

The timing of the production could not be more apt. In a city where anti-Semitic actions have been rampant this year--from the bombings of the San Diego Jewish Times (the most recent occurred last week) to the painting of swastikas on a synagogue, the House of Israel in Balboa Park and private homes--one has to applaud a small Christian theater troupe such as Lamb’s, which has dared to tackle a story that reveals the blood on the hands of those who sport such symbols of hate.

The direction of Robert Smyth, artistic director of Lamb’s, is exemplary. He never once dips into the temptation to sentimentalize or soften the portraits. And the actors, excellent all, reward him with fully fleshed-out performances that seem all the more touching for not disguising the warts.

One cannot overpraise 16-year-old Julie Arnall in the pivotal role of Anne. Spirited, forceful, sweet and sour, alternately brimming with confidence and anxious with confusion, she is proof that the smart-talking 13-year-old is not a recent sociological phenomenon.

Lee Weldon is a shy, sensitive revelation as Peter, the object of her affections. To watch Anne coax him out of his shell suggests the gentle wonder of seeing a butterfly emerge from a cocoon.

Anne’s parents are played by Carmen Beaubeaux and David Cochran Heath with quiet dignity. The pain on Beaubeaux’s face as Anne rejects her in favor of her father is palpable.

Peter’s parents, the Van Daans, are played by Deborah Gilmour Smyth and James Pascarella as a couple fractured by the tension that makes them jump at each other’s throats. The way she clings to her fur coat, her last symbol of departed elegance, and he to his cigarettes, so dearly bought on the black market, suggests the pathos of the pressure that brings two decent, but hardly heroic, people to the breaking point.

Chris Redo brings tight control to Mr. Dussel, the dentist whom the crowded family finds room for in their cramped space. Erica Kuhn lends quiet sweetness to Anne’s older sister, Margot; though an air of more knowing would enhance the tiny role. Veronica Murphy Smith winningly mixes courage with modesty as Miep, Otto Frank’s stenographer, who helped hide the troupe and nourish it, physically and spiritually, with food and news from the outside.

Mike Buckley’s set design, a central, crowded kitchen, bordered by beds, along with the theater’s in-the-round space, accentuates the sense of being surrounded by hostile forces. Mark Coterill’s classical and dignified sound design adds to the depth of the mood, as does the director’s simple and effective lighting.

The one critical absence in the production is the failure to find a way to tell audiences what happened to those in hiding after they were caught. The story may have been famous when it was published in 1952, but a new generation has come around since then, and the memories of even those who recall the work may not be as sharp as they should be. Audience members filing out on opening night wondered aloud about the families’ fate.

It would seem easy enough to allow each actor to give the name of his character and tell how and where he died, a story by itself: Mr. Van Daan, gassed Sept. 6, 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp; Mr. Dussel, died Dec. 20, 1944, Neuengamme concentration camp; Mrs. Frank, died Jan. 6, 1945, Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp; Anne and Margot Frank, died between February and March, 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; Mrs. Van Daan, died between April 9 and May 8, 1945, while being transferred from Germany to Czechoslovakia; Peter Van Daan, died May 5, 1945, in Mauthausen concentration camp, three days before that camp’s liberation.

Otto Frank, the only one to survive, died Aug. 19, 1980, after publishing the diary and commissioning the play from Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, thus fulfilling his dead daughter’s dream of someday becoming a famous writer. How tragic that the price of achieving the dream was to be so great.

Performances at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday with Saturday matinees at 2 and one Sunday matinee on Sept. 17. Closes Sept. 17. Tickets $13-16. At 500 Plaza Blvd., National City. (619)474-4542.