Do you want to know how important it is to become familiar with the brief but profoundly impactful life of Anne Frank?
Or do you just want to know how privileged we are to have the opportunity to spend a little time with her at DCP in Telford, PA this weekend and next?
The most challenging part to writing this review is not making it entirely about the indescribably sensitive and confident performance of the 12-year old actor portraying Anne, Ella Pinkerton.
But we’ll come to that, in a bit.
Let’s start with a short visit to just a small portion of Anne’s legacy, in order to prepare you for our strong recommendation of DCP’s deeply moving production of this most recent adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” into theatrical form,
An asteroid has been named after her.
Imagine Anne Frank hearing that a celestial object was named after a girl who didn’t live past the age of 15 years.
It is estimated that ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’, the published selections of her writings that inspired this play, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies. (Although Anne was German, she wrote her diary in Dutch).
The diary has been illustrated by the brilliant Russian-born Jewish modernist painter, Marc Chagall.
Just a decade after her death, its dramatization as a Broadway play won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. (The play ran 717 performances; the Frank family’s seclusion lasted 761 days.)
In a later production, Anne was portrayed by Natalie Portman.
A film version won an Oscar.
Time magazine named Anne Frank to its list of most influential people of the 20th century.
Her hiding place in Amsterdam was transformed into a museum in 1960 that still today, more than 80 years after her death, is visited by over a million people a year.
Her life and work have made such an impact that, predictably, those who somehow continue to live in fear and ignorance of her legacy of compassion have vandalized monuments, statues, and many other loving tributes to her memory.
There’s so much more to say on this, but our self-assumed task here is to encourage you to make every effort to find tickets to DCP’s production that runs through February 8, 2026.
Any production of this play will necessarily revolve around the actor playing Anne. The role is immense, not only in terms of text but even more in the demands it makes upon that actor to be willing and able to bring an audience, seated only a few feet away in the darkened theater in front of her, into the inconceivable world of yearslong personal sacrifce and daily terror that she must make real for them.
Never forget that Anne, her family, and four other people were forced into hiding by the Nazi invastion of The Netherlands in 1942, not to emerge until their discovery and capture more than two years later.
All but one of them were to perish within six months of their deportation from Amsterdam to German “detention” camps.
Anne fits Pinkerton like a glove, and there is never a moment when she allows you to take comfort that this is just a character in a play, rather than a real life young girl desperately managing to live more richly in hiding than anyone would think possible, while the outside world consumes itself in the fire of war and the mindless slaughter of European Jewry.
Her performance is extraordinary, but it is well met by the seven principal actors who weave in and out of her tale---
Thomas Rush plays her father, Otto Frank, who owned the buildings in which the fugitives sequestered themselves and who alone survived the Holocaust.
Rush is a seasoned actor, skilled in many genres, and he somehow manages to make real the unimaginable emotional toll Otto must have paid in order to effectively and fairly represent his daughter’s ordeal. His closing monologue is the finest work we’ve seen Thomas bring to the stage; it will truly shatter you.
Tiffany Peoples and Avianna McCarthy display the considerable deftness needed, as Anne’s mother and sister respectively, to present a convincing family dynamic. Peoples portrays Edith Franks’ inevitable breakdown beneath the weight of her assumed housemother duties with deeply painful verisimilitude, and equally painful is Margot Frank’s inexorable emotional and physical decline, particularly acute in contrast to younger sister Anne’s uncanny strength.
Petronella Van Dann, as played by Florence Wydra-Gat, and her husband Hermann, an employee of Otto’s performed by Julian Bonner, artfully represent two good and loving people who are seen to slowly bend and fragment under the heavy strain of lengthy confinement.
The Van Dann’s son, Peter, charmingly depicted by Tyler Knowles, quietly assumes the job of awakening Anne’s physical and emotional maturity. As with Pinkerton, the further downstage he plays his scenes, the more astonishingly persuasive he becomes.
Aaron Wexler’s Alfred Dussel, the eighth and most intrusive inhabitant of the Secret Annex where the play is set, meets the challenge of making the play believably Jewish, which is essential to assuring that no one for a minute forgets that the predations taking place are uniquely and distinctively those suffered by the Jews.
Especially essential in the face of festering international denial that the Holocaust ever took place, and equally essential in issuing a stern warning to anyone who thinks it can’t happen again.
And THAT is how important it is to become familiar with the brief but profoundly impactful life of Anne Frank!
We must also mention the essential roles of Miep Gies (Liz Aber) and Mr. Kraler (Chuck Kane), who at grave personal risk surreptiously saw to the nourishment and moral support of the eight principal characters. Their portrayals give this claustraphobic show the occasional sense of fresh air and relief their daily appearances must have helped provide those in hiding.
Logan Fling, Keyton Wenrich, and David Montanye literally burst onto the stage as Nazi thugs who abruptly bring the body of the play to its conclusion; fortunately, these actors’ energetic aggression and violence are brief and purely theatrical.
Director Maryanne Dell-Aquilla deserves great credit for managing to keep so many balls in the air and weaving together scenes played in a multitude of corners on this well designed and lit set by Patrick Gallagher. And Deb Takes' costumes lend quiet credibility to the time period and circumstances of the play.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” continues through February 8 at DCP Theatre,795 Ridge Road, Telford, PA 18969.
For ticketing information, please visit https://www.dcptheatre.org/buy-tickets or call