Last night, I was told that we performed The Diary of Anne Frank for more than 4,000 middle- and high-school kids, all told. I love thinking about that, maintaining the hope that we got through, that the story had an impact or the play itself turned kids on to theatre. As heartwarming as that thought is, there are inherent difficulties in performing the play for audiences that size, largely comprised of kids who had never seen live theatre before. After one show, I told Sara Wolf (Anne) that she had the fortitude of a saint for doing those heart-on-sleeve monologues while teenagers were whistling at her. She shrugged.
The cast tried to prepare me beforehand. "There are going to be two points in the show where they're gonna go nuts, and you can't do anything about it," the director told me. "First, when you fall down. Second, when you kiss Anne." I think Sara intentionally spent part of our rehearsal period trying to make me break character, just so I'd be ready. I'm not the first Peter the production has had over the years - in fact, I might be number six or seven - but I understood that these things do not change.
I have to say there's something cool about having an onstage kiss set against hundreds of hormonal voices, somewhere along the journey from the squeaky singsong of youth to the somber chalkiness of high school, going "WHOOOOOOOOO!!!" for about five minutes straight. We worked them up to it, too - three near-miss awkward moments that built the tension nicely.
Less cool was the constant feedback. Actually, basic ongoing quiet chatter isn't bad - you stop hearing it after a while. What was bad was the competitive coughing or other look-at-me antics, or just the truly disrespectful bits. For example, at the end of the show, after Loren (Otto Frank) said the part about Anne and Margot's bodies being dumped into mass graves days before the camp is freed, a voice from the audience did an irony trumpet (wa-wa-wa), prompting a classmate to shout, "That was SO childish!" Loren lifts the diary: "All that remains." Lights down, end of show, epic mental facepalm. Not that the kids were cut off: I heard gasps when the list of deaths began, all of us facing the audience, turning off each room's lamp as Loren reached our characters' names. It occurred to me, each time: They're used to the heroes getting away.
And then there were the talkbacks. I laud the production for having the stones to host educational sessions for 1,000 kids at a time, because you really never know what it's going to be. I was proud of some audiences. The first had great questions about our rehearsal process, and the second (the one with the wa-wa-wa kid) asked more and more questions about WWII, the Holocaust, and even the history of anti-Semitism. Other audiences never shut up long enough for anyone to be audible, cutting the session short. Once, as we left the stage, a few kids rushed up to the front and peppered me with real questions, and I did my best, but we were out of time. I wanted to say, "Next time, tell your buddies to keep their mouths shut," but didn't. When we could hear the questions, the most common ones were about the kiss - what was it like to kiss on stage? Was it a real kiss, or were we faking? Are we really going out? (Sara, once: "We're married.") Then, there were the questions about who lived. I think they heard and understood when Loren had told them - and the production makes it abundantly clear - but my guess is, they just wanted to make sure. When you're a kid, you hear something shocking and you want it confirmed that it's so, even if it means hearing it over and over again. There were also some dumb or nasty questions, which sometimes contributed to the team deciding to call it a day.
That said, I consider it a privilege to do the show, for its own sake as well as for the opportunity to work with wonderful people. (And if they want to cast me as a 16-year-old, I won't tell them otherwise.) And, y'know, for the kids.
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