Sitting in the dark, the sound of marching music begins to play and the previously blank video screen slowly turns red. With a bang, a giant swastika fills the screen and the lights come up. Several members of the Hitler Youth march onto the stage and begin extolling the virtues of the Third Reich. One's first inclination is disbelief - how could anyone could endorse such hate-mongering? But the shock value works brilliantly to draw the viewer into And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank, a drama by James Still. Performed by the Tufts Hillel Theater Troupe as part of Holocaust Commemoration Week, the show opens tonight at the Granoff Family Hillel Center and will play again on Thursday.
The show is largely the result of collaboration between three Omidyar Scholars as their public service project. "The arts are powerful educational tools and we hope that this play will stimulate dialogue about current human rights issues," director and senior Beth Rotenberg explained as to why she chose to direct this play as her project. The other two Omidyar Scholars involved are the show's assistant director, sophomore Jennifer Jarecki, and senior Michael Lang, who plays the role of Holocaust survivor Ed Silberberg.
And Then They Came for Me employs an unusual method of combining live acting and taped footage of interviews with Holocaust survivors. While it might seem difficult for the actors to adjust to speaking while a video plays, they said that it was actually rather easy, because they had originally practiced by having someone speak the video's lines. What was difficult however, was becoming involved in their respective parts. The actors must play multiple characters, with "different emotions, all in the same few minutes," explained senior actor Kevin Welsh.
The title does include her name, but the play is "less about Anne Frank, and more about how she affected those around her," according to sophomore Melanie Kahn, who plays Eva Schloss. The plot centers around Ed and Eva, real-life childhood friends of Anne who are still alive. It follows their journey to Amsterdam in an attempt to flee the German invasion. Ed vividly describes Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, where the Germans destroyed Jewish homes and businesses and arrested the inhabitants. That event motivated his parents to send him to stay with his grandparents in Amsterdam.
Ed and Eva often come to productions of this play to do question-and-answer sessions afterwards; however, they will be unable to make an appearance at the Tufts production as the event falls during Holocaust Commemoration Week. The audience does get to see a fair amount of them in the video, in which they describe their experiences. Eva was friends with Anne before the Germans occupied Amsterdam; they went to the same school. Anne had a fledgling romantic relationship with Ed before she was forced into hiding.
The subject matter which the play tackles is not for the faint of heart: "I came out of rehearsal kind of depressed every day," said sophomore Rachel Luck, who plays Anne. The general opinion was much the same, with most actors agreeing that portraying the Hitler Youth is the most difficult role.
While it is easy to feel extreme remorse for survivors of the Holocaust, most people alive today have no possible way of imagining what it was like to deal with the oppression of that time. "The hardest part about directing this material is finding a way to get the actors to connect to something that is so far removed from their own experience," Rotenberg said. She added that it was also a challenge to distance the actors from the material after rehearsal "so as not to be carrying the horrors of the Holocaust around with them for the two months of the production period, 24 hours a day."
Some of the actors felt more strongly about the subject matter: "It's completely impossible to comprehend or recreate the events," says sophomore Angela Hokanson, who plays Eva's mother.
The cast and crew have been working on various stages in the production process for about four months, and their labor is about to pay off. They have managed to get their message out to the audience, through posters boldly displaying the yellow star the Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust.
Though "entertaining" would not be an appropriate word to describe something of this nature, "stimulating" seems to be closer to the truth. It is engrossing, no doubt about it, and while it won't necessarily brighten your day it will make you think deeply about the horrors of the past.
'And Then They Came for Me' will play tonight and tomorrow at 9 p.m. in the Granoff Family Hillel Center. Tickets cost $5 and can either be reserved by calling Hillel at x3242 or purchased at the door.
