Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Auditions Coming Up for ANNE FRANK at Community Players


Community Players will hold auditions for their production of The Diary of Anne Frank, slated for performances in January 2014. Director Opal Virtue is using the newest version of the script, updated by Wendy Kesselman in 1997 to combine the 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning stageplay written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett with more recently discovered pieces of Anne Franks' writing as well as other accounts from Holocaust survivors. The 1959 movie also called The Diary of Anne Frank was also based on the Goodrich-Hackett stageplay, which was itself taken from The Diary of a Young Girl, the book version of young Anne Frank's journals about her time in hiding in an Amsterdam attic during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1942 to 1944.

There was some controversy about the Kesselman adaptation and how it changed a work that had come to be enshrined in the public memory, but there was controversy all the way back to The Diary of a Young Girl, in which Anne's father Otto Frank agreed to leave out anything considered indelicate or provocative, including his daughter's musing on sex as well as her less-than-flattering opinions about some of the other people in the attic. Different versions have been published over the years to include analysis and to restore material that paints a more complete picture of Anne.

The Diary of Anne Frank has roles for five women and five men, including Anne, her parents and her older sister; three members of the Van Daan family and another man who are also in hiding in the attic; and Miep and Mr. Kraler, the people who are helping them and providing a slim connection to the world outside their hiding place.

Auditions will be held November 25 and 26 at 7 pm, with performances set for January 17-19 and 23-26, 2014. For more information, click here or here.

No comments:

Post a Comment