BROOKSVILLE — On the second floor of a Brooksville playhouse, a teenage girl hunches over a desk, opens a diary and begins to write.
She is Addie Ladouceur, 18. For five performances in September, she is Anne Frank.
Live Oak Theatre will stage “The Diary of Anne Frank” on Sept. 11, 12 and 13, with matinees and evening shows on Friday and Saturday and a Sunday matinee. Tickets are available online through Zeffy.
The play compresses 25 months into two acts: eight Jews hidden above a warehouse on an Amsterdam canal, dependent for their lives on a handful of employees willing to smuggle food past the rationing rules and keep a secret. Anne, who entered the hiding place at 13, recorded it all — her parents’ marriage, her collisions with her mother and her older sister, Margot, the small cruelties of people trapped together on short rations, and her conviction that she would live to be a writer.
“She had so many dreams,” Ladouceur said. “Even though she knew she might not make it out, she still would be like, ‘I want to do this.’”
It is sad, she added, that everyone in the annex had dreams they never got to fulfill.
Ladouceur, who has done 10 other shows at Live Oak, said she would rather be a writer than an actor.
Preparations
The cast ran the full play the night of Aug. 11, mostly without costumes. The actors were off-book, said acting teacher and Live Oak vice president Vince Vanni, though a few still needed a line or a cue.
“Good!” Vanni called out during one exchange. “Louder,” he said at other points, sending actors back to redo a line when a scene needed more heat.
They are so far into the play, Vanni said, that they asked for an extra rehearsal nobody had scheduled.
The set eventually will move downstairs to the main stage, into a tighter space that better suits the material. Another production is using that stage now.
Producer Mary Hirose watched from the side.
“I’m trying to keep everybody on task,” she said with a smile.
Her grandfather fought in Europe in World War II and helped liberate concentration camps.
“He was a part of the Battle of the Bulge, but I think the liberation of the camps was even worse for him,” she said. “And that affected me as a very young child.”
Hirose read Anne Frank’s diary in eighth grade and was stunned by the ending. Anne is so hopeful in the last entry, she said, “and you turn the page and there’s nothing.”
She had watched auditions for Live Oak’s “Anastasia” and thought the actors who were not cast could carry “Anne Frank.”
Her daughter Jackie Hirose, 17, runs sound from a laptop wired to an old radio. The effects came with the licensing package: a train, dogs barking, an air attack, antiaircraft fire, gunshots, shouting in the street, the buzzer that warns the annex someone is coming, and radio broadcasts, some authentic and some re-created.
“I take the train whistle, train cue, and I put it together in one of her bad dreams,” she said of the scene in which Anne wakes screaming.
Jackie said she cries every time she watches it.
“It’s definitely something a lot of people need to watch,” she said. “It opens your eyes to how much has really happened to people.”
Ava McKissock researched heavily for her role as Margot, Anne’s sister. According to the Anne Frank House, Margot was a strong student who took a correspondence course while in hiding and hoped to work in medicine, as a doctor or a maternity nurse.
“She was also a very interesting person,” McKissock said. “She had a lot of different hobbies like tennis and, I believe, rowing. They just mention that she likes dancing. That’s a big thing.”
McKissock is the oldest daughter in her own family, she said, which gave her a way into the part. “I’ve also played a lot of characters like her.”
In several scenes, Margot has to pull their mother, Edith Frank, back from despair — and Edith has to do the same for her.
At one point Edith, played by Valerie Torres, throws a piece of bread on the floor after Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing food while the others sleep.
Torres, 49, is a mother of seven, with children ranging in age from 9 to 23. Her second-oldest plays one of the three Nazis who storm the annex near the end of the play. All of her children are involved at Live Oak, she said, and all of them will see the show.
“It’s horrifying. It really is,” Torres said of the ending. “Edith, she’s traumatized.”
Man of the house
As Otto Frank, Jim Wilson anchors the second act, trying to keep morale up and enforce the silence the group needs to stay hidden.
The tension builds through the play, “and you get to see it come out in the second act,” Wilson said.
In one scene he goes downstairs alone to investigate a noise, and the terror in the room is that he will not come back. He has appeared in “Guys and Dolls” and “Oklahoma!,” did two plays in high school and, in sixth grade, “Bye Bye Birdie.”
Near the end, the adults are playing cards around the dinner table and Anne, Margot and Peter are upstairs eating and joking. Then three armed Nazis burst in, and the eight are lined up for deportation.
The Gestapo arrested the residents of the annex on Aug. 4, 1944. How the hiding place was betrayed has never been established, and researchers are still arguing about it.
Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive. In the play’s final scene, Wilson’s Otto returns to the empty annex, moves through the rooms picking up objects and tells the audience what became of each person. The protectors hand him a book. He turns a few pages, closes it and sits down in the middle of the set, head in his hands.
In life, two of Otto Frank’s employees kept Anne’s diaries and loose papers and returned them to him when he came back to Amsterdam. He published them, first as a newspaper article and then as a book.
‘Mystery’ girls
Mary Hirose, a mother of four girls, has thought about what makes teenage girls such merciless observers. Anne arrives in the annex at 13 with what Hirose called a horrible relationship with her mother and spends the early scenes butting heads with nearly everyone in the room.
“Over the show, there is a maturity that comes, and I think also when you read the diary, she’s so aware, she’s just so very aware of what she’s experiencing, and she even acknowledges later on that she looks back at her writing and she’s basically appalled at who she was,” Hirose said. “What a loss. She would have been an amazing writer.”
Hirose’s older daughters are in the show, and her 10-year-old will see it. The right age for a child to see the play depends on the child’s maturity, she said, and parents are the best judges of that. She plans to introduce some scenes before the matinees so younger audience members know what is coming.
What has stayed with Ladouceur is how much life her character had.
“She’s a very ambitious girl,” she said. “She definitely had a personality. You hear about these things when you read a history book, but when you read her diary, it just makes it all a lot more real.”
Anne Frank was born June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, the younger daughter of Otto and Edith Frank. The family left for Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler took power. She would be 97 today. Margot would have turned 100 in February.
Anne and Margot are believed to have died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated. Her diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and adapted for the stage and screen.
If you go
“The Diary of Anne Frank”
Where: Live Oak Theatre, Brooksville
When: 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12; 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13
Tickets: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/the-diary-of-anne-frank-2
Cast
Anne Frank — Addie Ladouceur; Otto Frank — James Wilson; Edith Frank — Val Torres; Margot Frank — Ava McKissock; Mr. Van Daan — Alex Rivera; Mrs. Van Daan — Bonnie Von Dohre; Peter Van Daan — Henry Von Dohre; Mr. Dussel — Chris Hall; Mr. Kraler — Kyle Staley; Miep Gies — Elli Noll
The occupation
Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, and the Dutch army surrendered five days later. Anti-Jewish decrees followed almost immediately. Of roughly 140,000 Jews in the country, about three-quarters were deported and killed.
There were Dutch collaborators, and there was a resistance that forged identity papers, printed underground newspapers and hid people, including Jews and downed Allied airmen. The occupation lasted in parts of the country until Germany’s surrender in May 1945.
Film
There is a 20-second film clip shot on July 22, 1941, with a brief shot showing Anne Frank looking down from a window. A neighboring couple was getting married less than a year before the family went into hiding.