A diary of hope

Eight Bloomington High School South students gathered around a table, a menorah sitting in the center.

It was Hanukkah.

After presenting her gifts to the others, freshman Maria Lysandrou led the group in a traditional Hanukkah song.

Suddenly, they heard a crash. A dog barked. The students stood still and remained quiet, some huddling together.

They heard footsteps getting louder and louder. The student playing Otto peaks through the bookcase door to see whom it was.

“I think they’re gone,” he said.

Everyone was relieved — it was only a thief. They thought it was the Gestapo, the Nazi police, discovering their hiding place.

BHSS’ performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” will begin at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the school’s auditorium. They will perform again at the same times on April 5.

Tickets cost $10 for students in grades K-12 and $15 for the general public. They are available for purchase in advance on musicalartstix.com and at the BHSS box
office 30 minutes before each show begins.

The play is based on Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Frank’s family was forced into hiding during World War II and, along with another family, spent two years living in a secret office apartment in Amsterdam to avoid the Nazis.

During that time, Frank kept a diary.

Her diary was first published in 1947, and the original play opened on Broadway in 1955. BHSS is performing a new adaptation by Wendy Kesselman.  

Catharine Rademacher, a BHSS drama teacher and the play’s director, chose to use an onstage “in-the-round” seating style. Because of this, only 100 seats are available per performance.

The seats surround the edges of the stage. Wooden beds, tables, chairs and blankets lie in the middle. A bookcase with stairs leading to a small attic on the other side stands toward the curtain at the back of the stage.

Quotes from Frank’s diary are painted on the stage, winding their way through the middle section. Nazi propaganda and swastikas around the auditorium complete the set.

Attendees enter the auditorium and go behind the stage before coming onstage through the bookcase’s door.

“I wanted the audience to feel like they were in the attic,” Rademacher said. “I really wanted it to feel close.”

Rademacher traveled to Poland last summer, where she visited the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“I really wanted to bring the experience back to not only my students, but to as many people as possible,” she said.

She said she chose to perform “The Diary of Anne Frank” because Frank’s story was familiar to both audiences and students.

“People know about her,” Rademacher said. “I just thought people would be more in touch with it.”

Lysandrou, who plays Anne, said she read the diary last year in one of her classes and wanted to learn more about it through theater.

“I was excited to learn about her story,” Lysandrou said. “I really wanted to be a part of it.”

She said she watched documentaries about the Holocaust to further prepare herself for the role.

“She matured a lot during her life,” Lysandrou said. “Anne is not like the other people in this play. I would’ve been scared to death, but Anne is hopeful. She skips around the room and is very bright.”

The cast has rehearsed since January.

Rademacher and the students visited the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, where they heard from museum founder and Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor.

“Hearing from her made it a real experience,” Lysandrou said.

To better understand the Hanukkah scene, Rademacher had the students learn about traditional Hanukkah foods and songs.

She said some of the cast members are Jewish, and one had the rest of the cast over for a potluck Hanukkah dinner.

“They are just a really amazing group of kids,” Rademacher said.

Rademacher said this cast is a young one — only three of the 13 members are seniors.

Freshmen Justin Baltzegar, Hunter Brown and Bryce Carson play Nazi
soldiers.

They said they took it upon themselves to learn how the Gestapo worked and how to properly speak with a German accent. All of their lines are improvised.

“We need things to be accomplished, but how we go about accomplishing them varies from show to show,” Baltzegar said.

Carson said he hopes their performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” provides a good educational experience for audiences.

“Even through how horrible people can be, you can still forgive like Anne did,” he said.

Baltzegar said the show is a humanizing look at Frank’s experiences.

“The people at the Annex weren’t perfect,” Baltzegar said, “but they were people, and they didn’t deserve what happened to them.”