There isn’t just one young heroine in Burnaby Central Secondary School’s staging of The Diary of Anne Frank. There are many – and director Carol Mann hopes that the combined strength of their voices delivers a powerful message to their audience.
Mann is bringing a unique staging of the play to the stage at Burnaby Central next week, with shows from April 13 to 16.
The stage adaptation of the famous diary, kept by a Jewish teenager in hiding during the Second World War, has been a major undertaking for the more than 35 students involved as cast and crew.
Mann was inspired to bring the production to the stage after seeing it at the Stratford Festival last summer, in a production where the actors came out to address the audience with personal messages. But Mann was faced with one major challenge: the script only calls for 10 actors, and she had 29 students to cast.
So she double- and triple-casted the parts – and, in the case of Anne herself, she created parts for seven young narrators. Lines from Anne’s diary are often read in voice-over; instead, Mann has each young Anne come out to read the lines, then pass the diary on to the next girl with an embrace.
“In front of the audience, we see the transference from one Anne to another,” she explains.
The cast and crew also contributed their own diary excerpts for the play, and Mann chose short pieces to be pulled out and read by the cast to the audience. Some record ordinary, day-to-day happenings; others are “profoundly insightful” reflections about students’ own experiences and world events.
“I want this story to be as universal as it can be,” she says. “It’s so topical with what’s happening around the world, with migrants and warring countries.”
Yes, Mann admits, the subject matter is heavy (she emphasizes that the play is not suitable for children under 10) and there may be tears – but, she says, it’s also surprisingly fun.
“The play focuses on people learning to live together in very awkward situations,” she says. “They have fun, they tease each other, they get mad, they play cards, they dance. … These are people. They don’t know their outcome.”
The students have poured their hearts and souls into the process, Mann says, and they’ve undertaken more research than usually goes into a spring drama production – including a cast visit to the Holocaust Centre.
Their dramatic efforts onstage will be complemented by technology, in the form of visual projections, and by music, in the form of the school’s Resonance Choir. The choir, under the direction of Carrie Taylor, comes onstage and circles the cast for the closing scene, singing a choral rendition of the prayer of St. Francis (“Let me be an instrument of peace”) as the family’s hiding place is discovered and they are led away.
There’s even a closing movement number, involving all 29 students, that delivers the overriding message of the diary and of the play itself.
“To me, it’s Anne’s voice to the audience: ‘I’ve been loved, I’ve been loved.’”
FAST FACTS
What: The Diary of Anne Frank, presented by Burnaby Central Secondary School theatre production students
When: April 13, 14 and 15 at 7 p.m.; April 16 at 1 p.m.
Where: Burnaby Central Secondary theatre, 6011 Deer Lake Pkwy.
Tickets: $12 adults, $8 students and seniors. (NOTE: Production is not suitable for children under 10.) Phone 604-296-6850, email [email protected] or buy at the door.
