By:Susan Lin
"She's a real teenager," teenage actress Rori Nogee said of Anne Frank, a young woman whom we've all heard so much about.
Nogee is playing the title role in the play "The Diary of Anne Frank," a production of the Gray Wig Alumni Theater Company being staged May 25 to June 10 at the West End Theatre of Hofstra University.
In this version of the play, Nogee said, Anne Frank is someone who rejects her mother, though bonds with her father, argues with her sister, whom she calls "perfect," and comes of age in realizing her sexual attraction to a peer named Peter.
"I like playing both sides," said Nogee, the peppy Anne Frank at age 13, and then the more mature and self-aware young woman at 15, when she and those in hiding with her were finally discovered in an attic by the Nazis.
The director of the play, Marian Waller of Copiague, said that about 20 actors auditioned for the role of Anne Frank, but she ended up giving the part to Nogee, a senior at East Meadow High School, because "she showed me a wide range of emotions."
Seeking an emotionally well-rounded actor to play Anne Frank is perspicacious of Waller: This production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" is based on playwright Wendy Kesselman's 1997 revision of the Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett original script. Kesselman's adaptation of "The Diary of Anne Frank" debuted on Broadway in 1997, with Natalie Portman as Anne, and George Hearn as Otto.
The new adaptation incorporates pages of Anne Frank's diary that the girl's father, a survivor of the Holocaust, edited out when publishing the book "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" in 1947. (For a very thorough history of the making of Kesselman's adaptation, see the Web site www.annefrankonbroadway.com.)
About the Kesselman adaptation, Waller said, "They've allowed more not-so-nice things to be put in there. It's more powerful." She also said the new version, about an hour-and-a-half long, is about 20 minutes shorter than the original script.
"There are more sexually suggestive packages, awakening sexuality, things she felt," Waller said. The director also believed that Anne Frank's distraught relationship with her mother "was sort of whitewashed in the other one."
The Gray Wig's "Diary of Anne Frank" takes place in a rectangular-shaped room with a low ceiling, unusual for theater. The audience sits in chairs along the walls of the room. While watching the actors perform on the floor in the middle of the room, as opposed to on a stage, it feels like being in the attic right there with them.
The arrangement of the theater is "to make the audience maybe feel a little claustrophobic and tight-quartered, the way these people felt," Waller said. Also, the Gray Wig performance is one long act, with no intermission, which highlights the length of Frank's hiding.
But the point is not to make the audience uncomfortable while watching the play. "It's important with all the hate and prejudice that is still around, that people do remember this and that it doesn't happen again," said Waller, who is Roman Catholic.
For those people whose main motivation is to see a good play, Waller said that "The Diary of Anne Frank" is also beautiful in "the way that the human spirit just fights to live against everything, the way ordinary people cope with everything that was so horrible, and yet still manage to have families, have Hanukkah, and enjoy the little things."
'The Diary of Anne Frank'
May 25, 26, 27, 30, 31,
and June 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9 at 8 p.m.;
Also Sundays, June 3 & 10, at 2 p.m.
Hofstra University
West End Theatre, off California Ave.,
on the South Campus, Hempstead
Tickets: $16 adults, $14 seniors
Box office: (516) 463-6644
