Audience members moved through a dim hallway and entered the narrowing set of the Annex to find their seats at this year’s fall play, The Diary of Anne Frank. At the end of GDS’ version of the show, which ran Nov. 13–16, actors recited excerpts from diary entries by children experiencing hardship in Sierra Leone, Ukraine, Bosnia, Iraq and Israel. Freshman Mark Light wrote and read the final entry about his grandmother’s experience as a victim of the Holocaust. Notably absent, however, was a Palestinian entry.
The play was written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and is an adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, a collection of diary entries written by the German-born Jewish girl in hiding during the Holocaust.
“By adding diaries from children in other wars, past and present, the story becomes both specific and universal,” high school theater director Janos Szasz said in an email to the Bit. “These voices come not only from history books, but from the world we are living in right now—from bombed cities, secret rooms, shattered schools, and long, sleepless nights. Each diary grows out of a different war, a different culture, a different political reality, yet they all speak the same emotional language: fear, hope, confusion, resilience, and a deep need to be seen and heard. Placing these voices alongside Anne Frank’s is a way of saying that her story didn’t end in 1945.”
Freshman Bianca Catalano, who delivered the Iraqi diary entry, told the Bit she originally planned to read one written by a Palestinian child in 2023. According to Catalano, two members of the main cast, senior Ivy Sand and freshman Leo Moreland, also planned to jointly perform a Palestinian diary entry.
“A week or two after we’d chosen them [the entries] and were practicing them, I was told it was cut,” Catalano said of her original entry. “I think that was because they were like, ‘Oh, we have another Palestinian one.’” Catalano said Szasz told her that her entry, which she found and selected herself, was “too controversial and too recent,” and that he didn’t want Israeli or Palestinian entries from after the Second Intifada. Senior stage manager Lina Colla said other entries were compiled from books and online resources by Szasz and history teacher Topher Dunne.
“When we started choosing actual diary entries and [Szasz] started to think about the production less as a concept and more as an actuality, he decided point-blank that they would not be focusing on a diary entry from Palestine or from Israel present-day,” Colla said.
Later, Catalano said, the main cast decided to focus on the main play and not to perform diary entries at all, meaning Sand and Moreland’s entry was also dropped.
“I’m pretty sure it was a misunderstanding, because then later on in the play, Janos was like, ‘Wait, why do we not have a Palestinian one?’” Catalano said. “But by that time, it was too late.”
“[The omission] was not intentional,” Szasz said. “We had only five people, and they read what they had chosen. It was not a directorial decision. Every part needs to have a voice. That is very important.” Seven actors read excerpts at the end of the play.’
“I thought it was a really good addition to the show,” sophomore Rachel Hellman, who attended the play, said of the diary excerpts. “It really grounds in the reality of what happens to people during genocides.”
“I was thinking about the intention behind it, and if the intention was to ground us in the reality of the world today, I would have loved to hear some other perspectives from more recent examples of people being taken from their homes,” Associate Director of the Impact Lab Michelle McKeever said of the decision to end the play with diary entries. “That’s happening across the United States right now, and examples of other wars that are going on around the world, whether it be in the Middle East, or whether it be in places like Sudan.”
McKeever said when she watched the end of the play, she expected “either a story to come from a child in Gaza or something around ICE.” She emphasized the sensitivity of discussing polarizing conflicts like Israel-Palestine.
“It’s really unfortunate to me that we have to go to a place like the GDS theater to find resources about learning about these different genocides that have happened throughout history,” Colla said.
“The writers of the play made sure to show that Anne is just a kid,” Farber said. “Her monologues are that of an adolescent, and I like how that humanizes the experience of Anne Frank and makes her seem like less of a martyr and more of a kid who was a victim of a terrible situation.”
Rubinson similarly highlighted the importance of portraying Anne Frank as a regular person. “While she is a historical figure, at the end of the day, she was a teenage girl,” she said. “She’s a normal person.”
“Research has been a very, very big part of it for me,” senior EJ Mazo, who played Mrs. Frank, said. “The hardest part was you’d go through your day at GDS, and then you’d go into rehearsal and you have to put yourself in the mind of ‘my children are starving to death.’”
The theater department consulted Dunne and the DEI office on difficult decisions during the production process, including the decision not to show Nazi imagery.
The lights blacked out during the scene when the Annex is discovered so the audience hears the actors’ reactions but doesn’t see Nazi imagery.
“The parts with the Nazis, it’s difficult because you don’t want to erase that [history],” Rubinson said. “But you also don’t want to make it into a play. I know we’re performing a play, but we don’t want it to feel like we’re playing.”
“It’s something that you have to be realistic [about] without trying to replicate it exactly, because there’s no way to do that,” Farber said of portraying Otto Frank.
At the end of the play, Otto Frank, who was the only survivor from the Annex, comes on stage and speaks about the people in the Annex dying during the war and finding Anne’s diary. “The scene where Otto came out and spoke about all the people from the Annex that he had lost was really powerful,” sophomore Della Blum, who attended the play said.
“Theater shouldn’t just be Cinderella because kids will come to it and parents will pay,” Rubinson said. “It should be immersive. It should be impactful. It should be confusing in some ways. It should make us question our own complicity.”
Molly Kurtzer-Ellenbogen contributed reporting.