“The Diary of Anne Frank” Fails to Bring Her Story to Life

Dennis Hopper tells of an acting tip he received from James Dean: “Just drink the drink — don’t act drinking.” 

Great advice for actors — and in a sense for playwrights, too. Unfortunately, on both the page and the Long Beach Playhouse stage The Diary of Anne Frank suffers from too much acting at things.

Although The Diary of Anne Frank is based on the work of the 14-year-old Holocaust victim who kept a journal while hiding from the Nazis for a year-and-a-half in the top-floor annex of an Amsterdam office building with seven others, considering how much dramatic license the playwrights take — to the point of creating scenes to which Anne wasn’t privy — think of this as a dramatization of life in the annex, where Anne wrote her famous diary.

That would be fine, except for the fact that the script feels like dramatization rather than just drinking the drink. The dialog rarely reads as realistic, an artificiality that erects a barrier between us and the real people who suffered and persevered in that close space for so long. 

Unfortunately, director Phyllis B. Gitlin hasn’t done anything to tear down that barrier. For starters, Vita Muccia’s age alone — she can legally buy a beer in any bar in the United States — renders her an ineffective Anne. Part of the pathos of Frank’s diary is that it’s a child reporting this horror — but there’s no way for us to miss that Muccia is only acting at being a child.

Acting-at, though, plagues the entire cast, who are rarely able to animate the woodenness of the words on the page and are usually only acting at their characters’ emotions. It’s such a pervasive issue that there’s no way to be sure whether the actors might have been able to rise above with better direction. But when you see them acting at wrestling each other for a coat or a pair of shoes rather than simply wrestling, clearly acting-at is an aesthetic that Gitlin doesn’t mind.

Thankfully, Rick Reischman, who plays Anne’s father, largely transcends artificiality in his final monolog, producing genuine pain at being the only one who lived to tell the tale. Members of the audience were weeping openly. Heck, a tear or two may have even leaked from the eyes of a certain battle-hardened theatre critic.

The look of the production is solid. David Scaglione’s set design implies crowdedness without compromising theatrical functionality. Jacob Nguyen’s lighting is particularly strong in its darker, orange-tinged cues. Christina Bayer’s costumery is believable, and Allison Mamann’s props have been chosen/created with such care that you may be reading the only instance of my ever singling out a prop designer for kudos. 

Unfortunately, those props are not always well used. The most egregious example is the lighting of the menorah on the first night of Hanukkah. For all you goyim out there, a streamlined bit of Hanukkah 101: 1. Light the shamash. 2. Say/sing the Hanukkah blessing. 3. Light the other candles with the shamash. It was puzzling to see steps 2 and 3 disregarded, as if Jews forced into hiding because of their Jewishness wouldn’t bother with fundamental parts of a tradition they’re going out of their way to observe in the midst of their privation. (Consider how apt the blessing was for them in this moment: “Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.”)

There’s a simple slogan associated with the Holocaust: Never again. But antisemitism is alive and well, and somehow Holocaust-denial (like Earth-is-flat and moon-landings-were-faked) is really a thing. So Anne Frank’s 80-year-old story of horror, hope, and the human spirit struggling in the limbo between the two is far more apropos of today than it should be. 

Alas, this is neither a script nor a production that fully brings it all to life. 

The Diary of Anne Frank at Long Beach Playhouse

Times: Fri–Sat 8:00 p.m., Sun 2:00 p.m.
The show runs through May 6
Cost: $20 to $30
Details: (562) 494-1014; LBplayhouse.org 
Venue: Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach