The Diary of Anne Frank’ opens Friday at Perry Players

Even for director Don Boyd, the conclusion of “The Diary of Anne Frank” is hard to describe. Unlike most performances one would see at the Perry Players Theatre, for this show there will be no curtain call or bows at the end.

It’s that intense of a drama.

On Friday, “The Diary of Anne Frank” opens with a 7:30 p.m. performance. There are also showings on Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:30 plus shows the weekend of Sept. 18-20 and Sept. 25-26.

This is a familiar story about a dark time in world history. It is told mainly through the words of a young adolescent coming-of-age girl with her family plus one other forced to live in an attic. This is a fitting time to be telling this story on stage, for, according to Boyd, Sept. 3 was the 71st anniversary of the Frank family being removed from that attic by the Nazis.

“The response has been tremendous,” said Boyd about interest in this show, where reservations are going fast. “Quite frankly, we are close towards selling out the tickets. So if people want tickets, they really need the reservations. For a non-musical, that’s phenomenal. We have groups coming in right now as large as 50, and we’re not that big of a place.”

Boyd added nobody with Perry Players can remember when as many as 800 tickets were sold for a non-musical. That many tickets would be an average of 100 in the theatre per night.

“I think we are going to bust that all to pieces,” said Boyd. “That’s because of the interest in this show. You’ve got teachers bringing students, all that.”

What patrons will see is an adaptation of the original 1959 award winning script. Boyd said some light moments are included to create new dynamics for the characters. Otherwise, it is a “heavy” drama.

“The end is absolutely the most dramatic thing I’ve ever directed,” said Boyd, who last did “Unnecessary Farce” in 2014. “It actually requires the cast to have a cool-down session afterwards. There is no applause. The end … yeah, it’s dramatic, but it’s more than that. It’s emotional, but it’s more than that. It’s devastating. It’s something you wake up the next day thinking about. This is something that will evoke deep thought on the drive home. We don’t want to interrupt that. We want the audience to be left with that final scene.

“We had to limit the rehearsal of that scene. The actors actually struggled so. It attacks them so emotionally.”

The cast includes Stuart Appleton and Leah Robinson as Mr. and Mrs. Frank and Kellie Jenkins and Chad Sylvester as Mr and Mrs. van Daan.

Boyd related a story about some friends of the theatre who saw the first dress rehearsal, and one of them asked him what college does the actress playing Anne attend. His response: “That’s a 14-year-old girl.”

“He was floored by that,” he said. “I think that’s the best description of my cast. They are working levels beyond what you would expect. I could never max them out as far as feeding them direction and lifting the expectation up higher.”

The adaptation for “The Diary of Anne Frank” was written in 1997 by Wendy Kesselman with the original authors, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The director said these authors plus some scholars studied the diaries, but those were never made public, being instead sealed in a bank vault.

“Back when it came out in ’59 … a couple of things were suppressed,” said Boyd, added that Anne’s father Otto Frank was a ‘gatekeeper’ at the time of what could come out of the diaries. “One was the struggle Anne had with her sexuality as a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old. The other was the family’s Jewishness.

“What Kesselman and the original authors did in 1997 was do a rewrite where they brought forward those two issues. It was a 13-year-old talking about what 13-year-olds deal with as far as being a girl and having a boy there. This was in the diaries.”

Boyd said the Jewish issue was suppressed because the play was written for a New York audience, and anti-Jewish sentiments existed there in the late 1950s. But now that is featured in prayers and traditions such as Hanukkah.

Also about this play, the attic involved had three levels, for example bedrooms were above the dining room. Boyd said this play, as a memory play, is being staged differently where only parts of the set are lit at a time. It represents a timeline of memories, and he said memories are imperfect.

“It’s not realism, but it’s not surrealism,” said Boyd. “We’re selling this notion that what you’re seeing is the diary. We’re not taking you so much into the reality of the attic as it was. We are bringing (the diary) to you on stage.”

For reservations, go to www.perryplayers.org or call 987-5354.

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