behind the scenes — dreams of anne frank - Lewis Family Playhouse

B E H I N D T H E S C E N E S - -
DREAMS OF ANNE FRANK
A Resource Guide for Teachers and Parents
A B O U T T H E T H E A T R E……
N O T E S F R O M T H E A U T H O R:
Excerpt from author’s introduction in the Methuan student edition of the play DREAMS OF ANNE FRANK:
It is not surprising that young people identify with Anne Frank. Many young people feel trapped and locked within
themselves, are trying to grow up and make sense of the senseless happenings going on in the world of adults
happening around them…
But why was I chosen to dramatize Anne Frank?…in 1904 my father left his Jewish community in Amsterdam in order
to try to make a living in London. He settled in the East End and married my mother whose parents were also very
poor Jews who hoped to find a better life in London…The poverty lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War. I
was thirteen years old at the time; roughly the same age as Anne Frank. But whereas I was allowed the luxury and joy
of growing up and marrying and having a career and a family, children and grandchildren, Anne remains forever locked
in time; an eternal adolescent.
As a child, I often used to wonder about my relatives back in Holland and sometimes we would get news of them. I
dreamed of going there and was proud of my Dutch heritage. Just before the war broke out, a message arrived from
Amsterdam. It begged us all to return to Holland. They were certain Holland would remain neutral. We were assured
that we would be safer there and would escape the horrors of the inevitable approaching war. But our poverty in
London was intense and we used to go to the soup kitchen every evening, just to survive. My father, however, was
now fired with the idea that we all had to return to Holland and safety. To make this possible, he needed just fifty
pounds to pay the fare for the entire family. He tried to borrow the money. He tried to beg the money. He tried
everywhere, everyone. But money was in short supply. He failed and I still remember him wailing. Thus we were
thwarted from returning to Amsterdam, and thus we survived the death camps.
All our Dutch relatives went to their deaths. They evaporated into silence, forever. If my father had succeeded in
borrowing the money, we all would have made the same journey as Anne; we would have been rounded up and sent
to the transit camp at Westerbork and then to Auschwitz…
The work is a total imaginative creation. All the events and dialogue during the action are imagined and subjective. I
created the characters, relationships and events purely from the depths of my mind. Memory has no absolute
chronology. But how to find the real Anne? The flesh-and-blood Anne? The girl who lived and breathed beneath the
legend? How to make a living legend become human? When Anne entered that attic in June 1942 she also entered
history. But I was interested in my Anne. The Anne of flesh and blood. The subjective Anne. The Anne of dreams. This
is why I was not interested in dramatizing the diary. I needed to take another route, to find that specific human being,
to strip away the deification and bring her down to earth. In order to do this, I needed dream logic, movement and
song. I needed to create subjective events and personalities. If Anne could not move around in the real world of
Amsterdam, she could move around in her mind. There, within her imagination, all is possible. Anne can travel to the
Hollywood she dreamed about. She can go ice-skating; she can journey into the Black Forest in search of the
gingerbread house; she can converse directly with Winston Churchill. She can get married. She can even assassinate
Hitler and save her people. She can plead with the children of the world to bear witness to the madness of human
beings….
Dreams of Anne Frank is not a dramatization of her diary. Rather, it is an original way of focusing upon the girl, to
bring alive that unquenchable spirit and show how she managed to be creative in the darkest of times. To write the
play, I went to the facts of her life for the spine of reality and to my imagination for the subjective matrix, the
foundation of my drama.
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