Like most young women, Lucy DeVito first encountered "The Diary of Anne Frank" as an early teenager, a school assignment for a book report that drew her in with its drama and surprising accessibility. The half-Jewish 14-year-old readily identified with the Anne of 50 years ago. Aside from the author's frightening environment, DeVito reflects, "She was just like I was at the time."
That commonplace sentiment seems prescient now that DeVito is portraying Anne Frank in the Intiman theater's season opener. At 25, the appearance of the petite, doe-eyed brunette recalls the faded pictures of the creative teen whose account of hiding from Nazi authorities continues to touch the world.
Anne's writings document the 25 months spent by the German Jewish family in an Amsterdam attic. With her parents and sister, and eventually with four other refugees, Anne was sequestered to avoid persecution and the fate of the concentration camps. The refugees were ultimately betrayed by persons unknown, and Anne and her sister Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus only six weeks before the camp was liberated by British soldiers.
Her father, Otto Frank, survived Auschwitz but was the only member of the family left alive. On recovering Anne's diary, he published it in 1947. Its simple testimony was quickly embraced and produced as a Broadway play soon afterward, in 1955.
It's this original version, written by the husband and wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, that Intiman has chosen to stage, eschewing more recent changes to the work.
In later years, it was discovered that Otto Frank had substantially edited out many portions of the diary, passages in which Anne was critical of her mother and reflected on her own maturing sexuality. A "restored" edition of the diary was followed by a revised Broadway revival of the play, in 1997.
Even hewing to the original script, DeVito welcomes the newer information from Anne Frank. For her, it illuminates "how she was struggling, the secrets she kept from her family." DeVito notes that such insights confirm the existing text, in which Anne puzzles out her two sides, one bubbly and optimistic, the other more introspective and confused.
Conflicted feelings are hardly surprising, common to any young girl and complicated by such close quarters. DeVito admits that she has gained a new appreciation of the lengthy time the diary covers, particularly during a girl's emotionally turbulent adolescence from 13 to 15. "It's challenging, " she said, "but fun as an actress to show her development over two-and-a-half years."
The Holocaust might seem remote to someone of DeVito's youthful generation, but she insists that it doesn't seem distant to her at all. Her own ancestors, she notes, fled Russian pogroms, and the recent genocides of the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur grant the play currency. Unfortunately, she says, "Our world continues to deal with this stuff."
"The Diary of Anne Frank"
previews beginning March 21,
and runs from March 26 to May 17
at the Intiman Theater, Seattle Center.
Tickets: $10-$50; 206.269.1900
or www.intiman.org.