Clouds in a Young Girl’s Legacy

The legacy of Anne Frank, the 20th century’s leading icon of hope amid horror, shows no sign of dimming at the dawn of the 21st. At least five Southern California productions in theater, dance and classical music as well as a TV miniseries based on her story are expected from now till May.

Scholars’ qualms about Frank’s status as the most famous face of the Holocaust are not letting up, either.

No serious reader could question the emotional pull and literary excellence of the vibrant, thoughtful and bravely honest diary the teenager kept of her life in hiding during World War II.

But some historians worry that Anne’s story, often portrayed as uplifting and affirming human goodness, can put a false veneer on the Holocaust. There is no uplift, they contend, in a mature comprehension of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry--an almost unspeakable episode of bigotry and carefully engineered, assembly-line mass murder designed not only to exterminate but to degrade, dehumanize and humiliate.

Three separate stage productions related to the Anne Frank story will open locally by March 2, starting with a performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

One Girl, Many Stories

At Cerritos, the Montana Repertory Theatre’s touring production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” offers a new adaptation of the original Broadway hit.

The play is based on the diary Anne kept from the age of 13 to 15 while she hid with her parents, her older sister and four others in an Amsterdam attic. They were betrayed and deported to the death camps; only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived--along with the diary, which has sold about 26 million copies since its first publication in 1947. American sales of the mass-market paperback edition--one of several editions available in the U.S.--average about 250,000 a year, according to Barb Burg, director of publicity for Bantam Books.

The Curtis Theatre, a municipally run stage in Brea, will offer the original, 1955 version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” from March 2-18. It is the first play the Curtis has produced itself, according to theater manager Christian Wolf.

“Its familiarity and meaningfulness are the two keys,” Wolf said of this rare-for-Orange County expenditure of public money on a theatrical presentation. “Bringing that kind of message to people is important.”

A newer Frank-related play, “And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank,” runs Feb. 9-11 at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater. Presented by the Playhouse’s Youth Theatre, it is based primarily on the recollections of two Holocaust survivors who knew Anne Frank before she went into hiding. It is their memoir, with Frank appearing as a secondary character. The multimedia show interweaves live acting with historical photographs, audio bites and film footage; it seeks to give a broader sense of the Holocaust than the narrowly focused “Diary of Anne Frank.”

Also in the offing:

* “About Anne: A Diary in Dance,” a new, 90-minute work by Helios Dance Theater, choreographed by troupe founder Laura Gorenstein Miller. It previews Saturday at Conjunctive Points in Culver City; the premiere is April 12 at the University of Southern California’s Bovard Auditorium.

* Pacific Symphony’s upcoming release of a CD of pieces by composer Lukas Foss includes his “Elegy for Anne Frank.” Foss, a pianist who fled Germany with his family as a teenager during the 1930s, has been invited--though not yet confirmed--to perform the eight-minute “Elegy” with the orchestra May 2-3 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

* “Anne Frank,” a four-hour ABC television miniseries, will be broadcast May 20-21. It is based not on the diary, but on the research of Frank’s unauthorized biographer, journalist Melissa Muller. Hannah Taylor-Gordon plays Anne and Ben Kingsley is her father.

* A new feature film based on Anne Frank’s diary is in development by Fox 2000. Playwright Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy”) has been commissioned to adapt the original diary anew; a previous Hollywood version based on the play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett came out in 1959. It starred Millie Perkins, Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn.

All of these will invite the scrutiny of Holocaust scholars.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld--an Indiana University professor who has written extensively on how the Holocaust is portrayed and understood in popular memory--laid out some of his reservations in a 1995 article in the journal Commentary. He was struck by “the American tendency to downplay or deny the dark and brutal sides of life and [emphasize] the saving power of individual moral conduct and collective deeds of redemption. This tendency could be seen . . . in the uplifting ‘twist’ given to the stage and screen versions of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.’ ”

Avoiding the Horror

Works that emphasize the points of light amid the darkness, Rosenfeld argues, have “obvious benefits” in terms of reviving faith in God and humanity in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but they “may well serve to foster a great complacency about the most harrowing [episode] of this century.”

The 1955 script’s penultimate line has Anne’s voice declaring the most-often quoted line from the diary: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” To which Otto Frank, paging through her diary for the first time after his return from Auschwitz, responds: “She puts me to shame.”

“Anne Frank made it possible to have a happy ending,” said Sharon Gillerman, a professor of Judaic Studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. She teaches courses there and at USC on the Holocaust and how it is portrayed and remembered. “ I think it is too comforting and gives it to us too neatly. It fits with Americans’ desire for a happy ending, and the American psychology of ‘Don’t look back, look forward.’ ”

For Gillerman, stark, unsparing survivor testimonies such as “Auschwitz and After” by Charlotte Delbo, Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” and Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Drowned and the Saved” hit much closer to the overall truth.

“What historians writing today consider great is not comforting. It leaves you shattered, with a sense of fracture and disjuncture.”

Artists delving into the Anne Frank story grapple with these issues.

Greg Johnson, artistic director of the Montana Repertory Theater, said he chose to tour with Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaptation of Goodrich and Hackett’s script instead of their Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning 1955 original because, among other things, “it is more hard-hitting. There’s more anger and outrage at the end.”

“Whether these stories mitigate the horror is a very good question, and I hope people continue to talk about it,” Johnson said. “I go both ways on it. I don’t think the hope that is manifest in this young girl mitigates the horror. It’s an ironic and poignant counterpoint to it.”

James Still, writer of “And Then They Came for Me,” said turning Holocaust testimonies into a play was a task so daunting that he almost gave up.

“There is a danger of Anne Frank becoming an icon,” the Santa Monica-based playwright said. “How do we approach this subject without it becoming glamorous or easy? It should always be difficult to deal with this, and if it isn’t, then we’ve numbed ourselves and tricked ourselves.”

‘People Just Like Me’

Still’s memory of first encountering the diary as a sixth-grader in small-town Kansas helped drive him on.

“It was my first introduction to Jewish culture, the Holocaust and World War II. As Anne Frank was my link to the Holocaust, I made a pretty bold assumption that she could be a link to a whole new generation as well. If I had read in a history text about the politics or even the terrible things that happened, I don’t know that I would have been stirred emotionally as I was by the humanity in Anne Frank’s diary.”

The hallmark of the Anne Frank story is its ability to produce empathy, said Lisa Gary, who directed a 1997 community theater production of “The Diary” in La Habra and will direct the Curtis Theatre production.

“People come out saying, ‘You know, it was people just like me that were killed in the millions. They looked like me, they acted like me, and it wasn’t that long ago.’ The object is not to horrify. There is a place for that, but the object of this is to reach people by putting a very personal face on the Holocaust.”

On this there seems to be agreement: The diary and the performances it has inspired are not authoritative windows on the Holocaust, but they provide a good doorstep for youngsters.

“It’s a safer stepping stone into the Holocaust,” said Lisa Popa, director of operations at the Anne Frank Center USA, a New York City affiliate of the European Anne Frank Foundation set up by the diarist’s family to promulgate her work and memory and combat intolerance. Kids of all races, religions and dispositions identify with the coming-of-age story, Popa said.

Beyond Page, Stage

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization that combats bigotry and offers Holocaust education programs, reports that it is mandatory in California and five other states for public school students to study the Holocaust. In nine other states, Holocaust units are recommended. This educational push, Popa said, is one reason the Anne Frank story remains current.

Choreographer Laura Gorenstein Miller, the 30-year-old creator of “About Anne: A Diary in Dance,” said she felt an obligation, a historic urgency, to address the Holocaust through her art. Soon all the survivors and eyewitnesses will be gone, she said. “Whose responsibility is it to carry on their story? What role can I play as a young woman who grew up in the United States?”

Professor Marilyn Harran, who runs Chapman University’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, said it is up to teachers to make the story of Anne Frank resonate beyond the page or stage.

“Where do we go with this so that Anne and her story are not left in a box? What can we learn about the causes of hatred and the dangers of being bystanders? We need to find ways of empowering young people to learn about Anne Frank and do something with it, whether that is writing a letter for Amnesty International or simply, when you hear a racist or religious or ethnic joke, saying, ‘I don’t want to hear that.’ ”

But Holocaust scholar Rosenfeld wants students eventually to confront the darkest images and implications of the Holocaust.

“For a lot of people [Anne Frank] is as much of the Holocaust as they can take or want to take. She’s a bright, perky, creative, intelligent, ebullient girl-next-door. People cherish that image of her rather than mourn this corpse in an anonymous grave. If that’s the Anne Frank we remember, that’s not good enough. It sentimentalizes and renders pretty meaningless the real catastrophe.”

SHOW TIMES

“The Diary of Anne Frank,” Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Tonight, 8. $35 to $45. Students $17. (800) 300-4345.

“And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank,” Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater. Feb. 9-11. $13 to $15. (949) 497-2787.

“The Diary of Anne Frank,” Curtis Theatre, Brea. March 2-18. (714) 990-7722.

“About Anne: A Diary in Dance,” preview with panel discussion, Conjunctive Points, 3585 Haden Ave., Culver City. Saturday, 8 p.m. $15. (800) 905-5444. Premiere, Bovard Auditorium, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. April 12, 7 p.m. (213) 740-2167.