Center for Puppetry Arts show is poignant tribute to Anne Frank

The Center for Puppetry Arts tells the compelling and powerful story about Anne Frank’s day-to-day life in hiding from Nazis.

Even Mira Hirsch, first-time director at the Center for Puppetry Arts, admits to initially worrying about whether inanimate objects could carry the deeply emotional story.

But the performances featuring doll-like, delicately sculpted figures side by side with two actor/puppeteers, Jeffrey Hyman and Caitlin Roe, along with violinist Chip Epsten are moving audiences to tears.

First staged by the Center for Puppetry Arts in 2006, "Anne Frank: Within and Without" is getting a third production now through March 8.

The show is recommended for ages 12 and up, and post-show talkbacks take place after every performance. The talkbacks allow audience members to ask questions and share their thoughts about this poignant tribute to the famous diarist who kept a journal while stowed in a secret apartment behind her father’s business in German-occupied Amsterdam during World War II.

Using the elegant language of puppetry to illustrate one of the best-known stories of the Holocaust, the play, employing mostly table-top puppets, begins with Anne’s birth in Germany in 1929. It continues with Anne getting a red checkered diary for her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. A few weeks later, Anne and her family go into hiding.

In a magical sequence, a 24-inch-tall Anne puppet sleeps in bed while dreaming of ice-skating with her cousin “Buddy.” Down on the stage floor, away from the claustrophobia of the “secret annex,” the marionettes dance like winged angels, fluid and free.

The play also features chilling juxtapositions. One scene oscillates between Anne’s lighthearted chatter about classmates and ominous narration describing Germany invading countries and spreading Nazism across Europe. As the female actor manipulates and voices Anne sitting at her desk at stage right, writing in her diary and chatting about “Jenny” who “thinks she’s gorgeous, but she’s not,” and “Maurice Coster” who “is pretty much a pest,” the male actor narrates at center stage as projections of swastikas multiply behind him.

Anne’s words in her diary reveal remarkable insight, maturity and depth of feeling. With stinging poignancy, she also maintained a sense of optimism — all of which is captured through the beautifully rendered puppets we’ve come to expect at the Center for Puppetry Arts.

With the sounds of thunder and marching soldiers reverberating in the background, Anne speaks the following lines penned in the diary on July 15, 1944:

… it is utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Anne’s diary ends shortly thereafter on Aug. 1, 1944. The curtain doesn’t close with Anne’s last entry but instead continues with the tragic and heartbreaking death of Anne — and almost every person who was in hiding with her. Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before liberation in 1945.

“Anne Frank had a gift for writing and chronicling what was happening both within the Secret Annex and in the larger world outside of her hiding place. Young people can relate to her, because in many ways, she was a typical teenager, but one who was living through extraordinary circumstances,” Hirsch said. “She puts a name and face on the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.”