Fairfield fall play to focus on Holocaust story

Nov. 17—GOSHEN — Fairfield Jr.-Sr. High School's theater department will tug at the heartstrings this weekend with "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Historically, Fairfield Jr.-Sr. High School has hosted its annual play in the spring and its annual musical in the fall. This year, they decided to switch and begin hosting a fall play.

It's also Fairfield theater director Jennifer Parvu-Timmer's first year directing for the district.

"I really love the story of the Frank family and Anne's interpretation of it," Parvu-Timmer said. "Her desire was to be a writer and her writing got to live on."

The script is the original by screenwriters Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, first published in English in 1955, from the Dutch version in 1947, three years after the diary was initially released in English.

"It's something our eighth-graders read," Parvu-Timmer said. "I think that exploring the history of it is really important. These things and these events really happened and I think it's important that we acknowledge and respect that and I think it's what we do with it that makes us grow as a society."

"The Diary of a Young Girl," also known as "The Diary of Anne Frank," is a collection of writings by Dutch teen Anne Frank while she hid with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In 1944, the family was apprehended and Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

Frank's diaries were retrieved by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep gave them to Frank's father, Otto, the family's sole survivor of the Holocaust, just after the World War II was over. Frank's original work was published in 1947 just a few years after her death.

The runtime of the play is about two hours. For some of the all-youth cast, exploring the storyline and characters has been quite the undertaking.

"For our lead, it's been difficult because she can relate to Anne because she's that same age, and I think it hits them each a little bit differently how they can relate to their character and they've dug deeper into what happened after, like what actually happened to the characters," Parvu-Timmer said.

In addition to simply the powerful story recounted in the "The Diary of Anne Frank," the play features several deviations from the book's story, in order to create a story that could be told, originally on a Broadway stage.

"To make it for the stage, you have to have one set," she explained. "The Franks, they had their own bedroom, but in the play, they sleep in the living room. ... Anne and Dussel didn't have to share a room. The way the characters behaved with one another I think is still authentic to her story. There's a time when she hated Peter, and then Peter and her had a relationship, and then they were just friends in real life and that's true in the play as well."

"The Diary of Anne Frank" will be performed at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $10 and the show will be in the FHS auditorium.

To learn more, visit https://fairfieldhsin.ludus.com/index.php.

Dani Messick is the education and entertainment reporter for The Goshen News. She can be reached at dani.messick@goshennews.com or at 574-538-2065.