20-year-old directs powerful classic

PLAY REVIEW /// ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’



“The Diary of Anne Frank,” a longtime favorite play for community theaters, received a new treatment April 13 to 15 in a performance by Lit Live, the theater company dedicated to bringing classic literature to life for young people.

In addition to providing this service for students as well as the general public, Lit Live also encourages students to take the opportunity to direct. Twenty-year-old director Hannah Peterson chose to examine “Anne Frank” as a lesson in social interactions, as two Jewish families try to coexist while hiding from Nazi discovery in a cramped Amsterdam annex.

The play was staged at Playhouse 101, a black-box theater in Agoura Hills.

A black-box venue is the best way to stage “Anne Frank.” Playhouse 101’s confining and intimate space, bereft of elaborate sets, establishes just the right gloomy atmosphere to illustrate the claustrophobia and fear the families must have felt, forced to be deadly quiet during the daytime and allowed to converse, play games and socialize only in the nighttime hours.

Hayley Silvers traverses a wide emotional arc as the title character. Anne begins the play as a hyperactive, heart-on-her-sleeve preteen: playful, childish and unaware of the gravity of the situation.

It isn’t long before her immature behavior and squabbling begins to annoy the Van Daan family, made up of a mother and father and their awkward 16-year-old son, Peter.

Parker Arent is excellent as Peter, who averts his eyes and prefers to read by himself in his small room in the attic. J. Paul Zimmerman plays Mr. Van Daan like television’s Frasier Crane, with a resonant baritone and a persnickety, know-it-all attitude.

His chief joy in this bleak existence is waiting for his regular pack of cigarettes from Miep Gies (Arden Smith), an Austrian employee of Anne’s father, Otto, who brought food and other supplies to the families in the annex.

Samantha Netzen plays the vain Mrs. Van Daan, who gives up her most prized possession, a fur wrap, when the families run out of money to buy food. Jordan Gannon is stolid but sensitive as patriarch Otto Frank, and effectively delivers the emotional epitaph at the end of the play.

Marie McKnight is outstanding as Anne’s older sister, Margot, bespectacled, sensible and bookish, while Amber Rivette is also good as the girls’ mother, Edith.

Peter Mazzeo portrays Mr. Dussel, the fussy dentist brought in to share Anne’s room, playing him as more of a comical character, annoying Anne with his odd nocturnal habits.

Ron Rosen does a sensitive job as Mr. Kraler, another of the families’ benefactors. As a Dutch associate of Otto Frank, Rosen is the only member of the cast to attempt a regional dialect. Even the offstage BBC radio announcer spoke with an American accent.

The stage was separated from the audience by a wide, opaque shower curtain suspended on a sloping metal rod. The curtain was drawn to preface each scene, and the noisiness of the metal rings often overwhelmed the voice-overs that began each scene, to a point that got somewhat annoying.

During the final scene, when a single Nazi officer (Josh Donaldson) discovers the families’ hideaway, the apprehending of the refugees is performed in a way that only their silhouettes can be seen. It was a disquieting way of concluding the play, leaving to the imagination the horror of the residents as they were led away to their ultimate doom in the concentration camps.

For more on Lit Live, visit litlivetheaterco.com.