Archives for May 1, 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review a webcast production of The Diary of Anne Frank from St. Paul, Minnesota. Here’s an excerpt.

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Why can’t theater companies throughout America revive important small-cast plays, using Zoom to let the actors perform from their respective homes? I’m not talking about a one-shot reading but a full-fledged production—one, however, specially tailored to the unique properties of Zoom.

Now comes the answer, not from Broadway but from Park Square Theatre, a Minnesota troupe new to me whose plans to perform “The Diary of Anne Frank” for more than 12,000 students in St. Paul were sabotaged by the pandemic. Instead of abandoning the production, the members of the cast, who were already using Zoom to work on their lines, decided to move the entire show to the web. Ellen Fenster, the director, restaged the production with the technical assistance of Aaron Fiskradatz, a local theater artist and “Zoom technologist.” Billed as “a special online production created by artists in isolation,” it is far more than a mere stopgap: It is the most stirring staging of “Anne Frank” I have ever seen, a version that employs the unique properties of Zoom in a way that heightens the intrinsic drama of the play itself…

Adapted for the stage in 1955 by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, “Anne Frank” is a dramaturgically old-fashioned but nonetheless thoroughly sound dramatization of the story of a Jewish teenager from Amsterdam who hid from the Nazis with her family, setting down her day-to-day experiences in a diary that she left behind when the Franks were found and imprisoned by the SS in 1944. Though Anne died in a concentration camp, her diary survived, and the stage version, which was filmed exceptionally well by George Stevens in 1959, remains a regional-theater staple. Small wonder: It tells an emotionally overwhelming story with a simplicity that brings it within reach of just about any cast imaginable, students and amateurs included.

This production, however, is in no possible way amateurish. It is acted by a very, very strong 10-person ensemble led by Sulia Rose Altenberg (Anne) and Michael Paul Levin (Mr. Frank), each member of which appears in costume in a separate Zoom box, seated in front of neutral-colored backdrops of varying shades. They speak directly to the unseen “audience,” using simple, sparing gestures but making no attempt to suggest physical interaction until the play’s climax….

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Read the whole thing here.

The climactic scene from George Stevens’ film version of The Diary of Anne Frank:

My beloved Hilary died a month ago tonight. I returned home from the hospital to the enforced solitude of life in latter-day Manhattan—she was the last person whom I have touched—and I’ve been trying ever since to stay afloat, helped immeasurably by the love of friends, the sympathy of strangers, and the miracle that is the social media. I could not begin to thank enough people for saving my life, which is what all of you did by reaching out to me, generously and unhesitatingly. I have even made several new friends in the midst of mourning, which sounds utterly improbable but is nothing more than the truth. I am alone—and not alone.

One dear friend gave me a stuffed Hobbes doll, which now sits on the couch where Hilary and I spent countless hours talking, watching movies together, and simply being with one another. It doesn’t feel quite so empty now.

Allow me to let two messages stand for the thousands that I have received in the past month. One was attached to a plant that an old friend sent me yesterday:

Dear Teach,
This is the space
for the words
that try to comfort, to honor Hilary.
To acknowledge your suffering and say,
I see you. I see your heart.
How can any words do that?
So, I offer you this green
living thing.

The other was sent to me by one of the very first recipients of Makoto Fujimura’s new Hilary Teachout Grant, an emergency relief grant for performers and other artists that is named for my late wife:

I just received the shortest and sweetest message to grace my inbox letting me know that I’m on the receiving end of a grant in honor of Hilary. While I know you only through your love of writing and the arts, I’ve come to know both of you through your transparent and generous accounting of the stuff of life and its limits. And I know you, now, to be the first “yes” that I’ve seen in a long string of “no,” “not yet,” “not you,” “no more left” these past five weeks. While the message from the board was perfunctory, I sat at the screen and wept because of the invisible impact this human will have on my life and how I was glad to know your incandescent opinion of her. The money will surely be useful, but the memory of this moment is going to last me a very long time.

Me, too.

To lose the love of your life at the very moment when you expected her to be saved is painful beyond words, beyond belief, beyond understanding. To be comforted as I have been comforted is…well, it, too, “passeth all understanding.”

Thank you all. I will never, ever forget what you’ve done for me.

Nat King Cole and His Trio perform “Little Girl.” Cole is accompanied by Irving Ashby on guitar, Joe Comfort on bass, and Jack Costanzo on bongo drums. This performance, which dates from 1950, is a Snader Telescriptions “Soundie” film that was made to be shown on a video jukebox:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“There are no heroes of action—only heroes of renunciation and suffering. Of these there are plenty. But few of them are known, and even they not to the crowd, but to the few.”

Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography (trans. A.B. Lemke)