Strong Performances Elevate Uneven 'Anne Frank' Drama

Strong performances elevate uneven 'Anne Frank' drama

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

The one way to fully appreciate “The Diary of Anne Frank” is to separate the 1958 play - whose Ann Arbor Civic Theater production opened last night - from the diary that inspired it.

The husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett admirably recreated the distinctive personalities of the eight Jews who hid for two years in an Amsterdam warehouse to evade Nazi apprehension. But there remains no way to stage a conventional dramatization and also explore the cerebral complexity of young philosopher Anne Frank.

Wise beyond her years, Anne hid her often melancholy persona behind a veneer of teen-age wisecracks and coquettishness. Even her commonly quoted assertion -that in spite of everything she still believed humankind was good at heart - is immediately followed by her bleak vision of a future world grown monstrous and horrid.

Since Anne chose not to display her gloomy side - in her final diary entry she writes of the “two Annes” - the best Goodrich and Hackett’s play can manage is a brainy yet sunny-side-up Anne who no longer dominates events. Yet “The Diary of Anne Frank” remains a cracker-jack ensemble piece that intimately chronicles the lives of eight people bunched perpetually on the edge of disaster.

One could scarcely wish a more searching portrayal of life inside a shoebox than that offered by Civic director Cassie Mann and a mostly dynamite cast. Mann and her actors capture all the wild mood swings of people forced to exist too closely together until the slightest altercation can trigger screaming confrontations.

John Moga’s fragmented, deep-focus set makes the perfect battleground for super-actresses Susan Morris (Mrs. Frank) and Wendy Wright (Mrs. Van Daan) to go bellowing toe-to-toe, for Marshal For-stot (Mr. Van Daan) to bluster in a perpetual parody of machismo, for wonderful Tom Franks (Mr. Dussel) to play the definitive sardonic grump, and for Jennifer Ann Gross (Anne) and Brian Kimmet (Peter Vann Daan) to taste young love. Their first lass and Anne’s subsequent reaction is a howler.

Only Thom Johnson seems wobbly in the basically thankless role of too-saintly patriarch Otto Frank. Jennifer Ann Gross fares better at probing the dark-side Anne lurking behind the talkative clowning and adolescent posturing.

Mann’s direction is solid, swift and smooth, making palatable even the drama’s awkward prelude and postscript. “Anne Frank” doesn’t do Anne’s diary justice - what could? - but it’s a splendid, fierce work of theater all the same.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" will continue through Saturday at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre in the Michigan League, 911 N. University St. Curtain is 8 p.m., plus a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m. For information, call 763-1085.